Artless, bloat-kidneyed gibbet. Cudgel, implement of pain and death, how you lash. What a lovely container you are, shrouded in the old razzle dazzle: a trick—a delight!-- a trick. In the end, you are just a hologram, and I stick my finger through your eye. This is how we demean. We wee lads and lasses-- we can be such worms, burrowing for devices to widen the space between us, turn nouns to verbs: fistulas to festers.
In the Gown I Wear to the Uprising
We all made our clothes and mail for the occasion. Some melted down their own cutlery for a helm or gauntlet or gorget, melted their last coins and pulled them, molten, taught to lace into links for hauberks. But I made myself a gown, every thread unraveled from the cape of a fallen king, a cloth my family had been weaving since the beginning. I could fit a crossbow in my bustle, throwing stars in the balconette, but I do not. There is a politick in these clothes, but clothes mean differently than actions, and our actions are clear: we make, and wager, and make. It is in our blood to make, not to make bleed.
