Behave Yourself

Take a wooden stick and hit a pole with it
Listing to the sound it makes as you fly
into rage the detail and shortness of breath
as the wood breaks against iron its age outnumbering
its flex 3 to one and tearing its fibres now dried and unconnected

the eye moves in the socket with ease but broken
by a lack of control the scholar’s ear that opened
like a butterfly wing and raced into skylight

Tortured ribbons silk threads dragged into patterns
could not recover quality nobody to reorganise them
until you started trying to undo the mistakes
unpick the threads and put them back into order
something I thought would not do without you

on the spinning world, unconfessed thieves chased the wheels
and plotted to collect insurances on the world coming to its end
there they queue up to collect their sacred dividend