The ones who come after us won’t wonder what our figures rounded up to When they ask about us, they will ask: “why did they bleed their gods dry?” They will carry our rib cages as gambling charms They will use our thumbs to chisel stardust from their teeth – the future will throb like the eyes of an underfed octopus They will skip the safe houses – when they think about sanctuary, they will curl their jaws around the earth’s crumpled eyeballs, whistling symptom after symptom to their father’s moonlit bones They will learn to believe that the end has no appetite They will learn how to starve their roars into proportion There will be no point in tightening a figure of speech around their necks When death comes for them it will be a death that has lingered in the ceiling tiles for a long, long time They won’t need to rewrite our poems They will know why we tattooed the rain with the lips of our prophets, with the ears of our ghosts They will know more than their skulls were built to store They will know that you found your imagination coughing up blood in someone’s else’s prison cell They will spend the last scenes of our trilogy hollowing out the masks we left behind, inching their nowhere just shy of our untitled fuse