Epektasis

I speak from a coast
where light does not flatter—
it works
or leaves.

Granite keeps its face.
It does not remember for free.

Morning: salt, diesel,
wind worrying silver birch
until the leaves give up
their small applause.

By night, the count is done.
Not written.
Paper travels.
Silence stays.

Do not tell me we chose this.

The vote is a curtain.
Behind it:
a hand on the rope.

Coins soften their voices.
Keys change weight in the pocket.
Power eats late
in padded rooms
where the carpet has forgotten feet.

A child cries.

A column is adjusted.

I watched.
I learned how easily a mouth becomes a room
you can lock from inside.

Land is leased—
not sold—to fear.
Fields sign themselves away
before the frost lifts.

At noon, uniforms rehearse
their sentences
over burning bins,
over grain.

By evening, blood has learned two dialects:
across the line, war.
Here, crime.

The river carries both—
past granite steps worn smooth,
past a red suitcase
wedged beneath the bridge
like a question
no one claims.

I have watched wealth polish the dark
until sleep turns hard.
I have watched bread become a number
while hunger learns procedure.

Faces thin.
Steps smooth.
Everyone passes.

If heaven listens,
it does not mistake this for order.

Some days I don’t believe it listens.
Smoke outruns prayer.
Ledgers speak first.
Meaning arrives late,
if it arrives.

There is a tense not licensed here.
A verb we are fined for trying.

I glimpse it
when the tide returns
to the same shore
without permission,
when silver birch refuses speed,
refuses to make patience into delay.

The future will not announce itself.

No horns.
No fire.

It will arrive as accuracy:
a day when teeth forget their arguments,
when a small hand enters shadow
and nothing reaches back.

Predators will lose posture
before teeth.
Venom will remain—
it simply won’t persuade.

The mountain will be ordinary—
unclaimed—
because no one guards it.

Knowledge will come like water here:
rationed, cold,
carrying the careful and the broken
without asking who deserves it.

Until then,

I pray awake.

Against desks.
Against podiums.
Against velvet chairs
that remember every body
but the poor.

I wedge words under the age
like iron under a stuck door.

This is not comfort.

It is practice.

Let the grip loosen.
Let the hand open
and find
it has been holding nothing alive.

Let the future begin here—
salt on the tongue,
granite underfoot—
not as victory,

but as justice
learning to breathe
without permission.