I watch people trawling for all expression of light like greedy black holes of insatiable platitudes no one will teach them to regret.  They take their nets through the underbrush catching at twigs and thorns that pull at their hair and knot the threads of their fear without dimming their hunger for shimmering flecks reflecting off the dead branches they’ve hung their dreams out to dry on.  I watch people trawling for scraps of light as though it were the everything, the coin that opens happiness, the element that delivers the secret of God.  I watch people falling on their knees to the sun, shedding themselves like abandoned promises, falling to their knees in abject worship.

The light is emptier than they can measure.  It reflects back to them what is already there.  I have tried to catch it too.  I have broken myself against the impermeable glass I was born looking through trying to claw my way out of this dark.

Prey lives in the negative space between the cracked clay and the cotton.

Hunger is sated in the negative space between light and dark.  I would aim my arrow where it meets, where color fills the hollows.  I would aim my arrow where the drums hit low and break through the placid surface of dead lakes.  The vein of the doe is strung between the brush and the sky where everything runs red with iron and oxygen.

The light isn’t the driver of God, it doesn’t scare the devil from the corners.  The light is what burns through your retina and blows through your skin until it’s an opulently transparent husk.  The dark feeds everything the light evaporates with heat.  The dark cools streams and slakes thirst.  It’s the thing that holds the light to earth.

I am the arrow that aims where color fills the hollows and weeps for mercy.

I am the prey.

I am the prey that hides in plain sight.

I am the prey you can’t see under this canopy of light.