appealing

The Maynard
Spring 2015

Ace Boggess
0:00
 
 

Why, And for What Purpose Is There All This Horror?

—Tolstoy, “The Death of Ivan Ilych”

Freedom sounds an ugly chord.
You choose the road.
You choose the meat.
You choose between the silence
of clover fields &
that of a deep sleep
which isn’t silence at all
but a string of angry voices
like Senators cancelling
one another out.
Go on. Disguise the limit.
The burst is yet to come.
Who might you love &
who seduce? Who
will you wrestle
in a blind alley at 3 a.m.?
You answer to none
but gravity, already
pulling you low, lower.
Your friends,
if you selected well
will post your pictures on their memory wall.