No-Man of No-Man’s-Land

On either side of the Radcliffe line

that cleaves me into two there lie

the severed limbs of beings

who were born neither here nor there,

but plumb on the laser border,

which butchered them at birth;

now they lie quaking,

and the sky laughs at them.

Somewhere a disembodied eye

looks in vain for its tears.

Somewhere a smile flutters,

hunting for its lost lips.

Somewhere an arm crawls

in search of its twin.

Under the full moon, I’m both

forensic tech and midwife,

ushering bodies into grief’s ken

or the solace of completion.

Sometimes I must improvise,

with form or its approximation.

A brown arm from a heap,

a black one from another.

One green and one blue eye,

a fat head over a thin body.

Thus I make a motley man

whose innards are 

a bagful of quailing snakes,

whose legs are of unequal lengths,

and whose name is half a word.

He is the no-man of No Man’s Land.

His home is the cave

deep in the mountain’s jaws.

He entered it as the mountain yawned.

Soon, it will cough him out,

and he will know homelessness

despite already belonging nowhere.

—

Hyphens

In the beginning there was

no word, just countless hyphens

floating in longing;

                   linking

un-words to un-words,

they made a soup of spaces.

Thus the formless grammar

dwelled in itself.

Once language came,

and the world with it,

the hyphens vanished

into living and non-living things,

that, free at one end,

still yearn to join together

in wordlessness:

the appendages

and recesses of the world.