Youth Is Not Absolution for Treachery; It Is a Morning Star of Some Kind
If you keep punching at a man’s head
it will mix his mind. So fast.
So pretty.
I want my brain to be the jangled thud
my body makes when it bangs against the ground.
I want you to say my name,
knock a broken branch against its tree
and that song will be a page
in a book you love to hold in your hand
because it is a birdcall that proves
you are privy to a superhuman scale.
I believe God is healing my soul right now
by killing my body. Slowly.
The opposite is true for your body, illuminated
by a light fired from another world,
seeing what other men have only thought.
Infinite are the fast mercies,
infinite the pretty occlusions.
-Travis Nichols
About the Author
Travis Nichols's work has appeared in FO(A)RM, Filter, Factorial, Lungfull, and the anthology Isn't It Romantic. He is co-curating the exhibition Poets on Painters, which opens at the Ulrich Museum of Art in Wichita this April.
