Edit: Two Stories About Skin

He was evicted by an overwhelming need: He had to leave this place immediately. It was not a matter of escaping here; it was a matter of being there, a there unknown apart from its distance, a distance from which he could see his home whole against the sky, the distance prescribed to those who aspire to love.

He stripped some bark from a nearby tree. On the bark’s smooth inner wall he created a map. Then he set off to survey the edges of the world. As he traveled, he traced out his path on the map. As his map neared perfection, the dense concentric loops finally showed him an exit.

*

In the end,
the trees will grow like snakes,
splitting and sloughing bark,
bending in coils of green heartwood;
and the snakes will grow like trees,
depositing skin under skin,
and in their turgid leather casings,
they will lie about
on the ground
like broken branches.

(Original here.)

One thought on “Edit: Two Stories About Skin

  1. I have to conceive of every attribute the “snake” motiff has.
    Then relating these to the opacity of “end” by hybridizing “snake” and “tree” compels a reckoning with the altercations of our nascence as immersive in “green” for ethereal redolence attributes intrinsic to “tree” from whence our own breaths are intertwined, To resolve the metamorphoses of our being unity to its subjective nodal imminence states of untrained music, and reconstitute as the harmony of centrifugal volition attenuated to kundalini in chloroplast, indefatiguably phototropic is the manner of acquiescence to the mortal obligation. We have annihilated nihilism in the verdant of light elocution, and atrocities of axiomatic reticulation are undefeated in serpentine peristaltic paroxysms. A tree is holistic from beginning to end and gives all requiring nothing from us but sanctity. This poem is the abolition of every type of indigence, with the ascension of our cognition to transmutated consciousness emancipation. It is a sublime advocacy and acknoledgement of our Divine Intercessor.right on the tarmac, under the wing of gamma burst contrition and concession.it is the end of human obsolescence according to John 3:14. Thanks for this poem.

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