Escape's End

Make us in your father’s image.
Break us on your wheel.
Shape us with the binds tight
to your fierce love. We turn

at your command, around and around,
head over heels, dazzled with sky.
Against your industrial heat
clouds scatter, rain baulks

at your factory winds,
its promise sent nowhere.
Disgust from your eyes is
the only weather we know,

a tempest driving us on
up out of now, through growth
into the glittering infinity
your cold stars spin anew.

Beneath your crystal frenzy
writhes and slithers the teeming slime
your revulsed frown excites.
In the greying light, growing

confusion and decay.
A disjointedness weeps out
of the left-behind, steeps
as it rots, colours as it kills.

Direction has collapsed. Here
the spinning wheels we are
throw out their high-pitched sound
from which new bonds are spliced

while matter, our very stuff,
coalesces to clones of clones
in the gusting fear. All we know
is somehow, that’s all. Somehow

this is how it is. Yet in forgotten muck
a protest made of oldest time
finds eyes again, slips fingers
onto feminine hands

and smooths itself to life.