Cautious memories adrift in grounded static,
recorded in pencil notes, an uncommon typography:
(Perhaps they are blueprints outlining the proposed
construction of some device which would deliver
heat and light and, barring miscalculation,
the targets, “will hear nothing…”)

Their fondness of history, of its numerous
retaliations and responses, encoded
by ballistics-savants in love with the music
of undetonated munitions; hollow brass,
the color of an artist’s eyes, reflected in the shells,
reflected in the eyes, lit seemingly from within;
an inorganic hue, muzzle-flash linguistics,
ears built by generations of composers whose
dire melodies—fatally pianissimo, delivered alongside
rapidly descending crescendos, the lowest notes
in the register—brought sleep and fire.

From within the hollows of their works,
their created void sends back whispers,
the ghosts of voices whose owners do not speak.

Bridges destroyed by bombs
with perfect pitch, perfect trajectory;
loosed by children who failed to
understand that gravity does not know
any better, does not concern itself
with the end, only the line itself.
Was a city made of light changed here?
Ash and splinters while they slept,
the sinking tonality of breaths slowing,
in unifying noumena, the love traveling
like electricity between the tips of ten fingers
meeting ten fingers; the pairs of eyes frozen
peering skyward at the shivering roof-slats;
the back cover of a book, which when closed
at last reveals the deus ex machina; a simple
machine, filled with eager fire, with light hungry
for shadows and bricks and tightly-closed eyes,
which knows only to fall, to keep falling,
and to never stop; to kiss the earth, to open,
to devour, its magnum opus ultimately nothing
more than a ringing silence.