XERAFIN

Millennial eyes falling on the great wheel, the planet sighing in its bones.

Time is incomplete. This guitar is incomplete. The unknown is gaining on us. Without effort, like the wind.

I seek my true name in library books from the twentieth century. I look for love in an exploding star of digits. My extinction I carry with me.

What does it mean for us to live like insects?

In Picasso's famous painting, the screaming horse is most terrifying. In France scientists study the voiceboxes of horses, using helium to discover how they whinny.

There is a tree outside my window, etc. Do you remember in the beginning how all was physics? We didn't know to call it abstract.

Motive seeds pressed into profusion, out of season. Planet strangling itself. Goats for gargoyles was whose idea? Devil-horned but soft-eared. Goatfoot, but alert to beauty. Hands of clay.

Wind flocks in the tree; takes flight.

Alpha licks omega.

My extinction I will carry with me.

DUPAGE COUNTY HERE WE COME

Cars ride strands of fire burning like perhaps two hundred horses gallop.

Concrete hot with them up.

On the prairie highway rise the billboards the office parks their exteriors the sun wipes its copper on.

The hum of it snaking beyond the city, cheery impatience masking desperation.

The Eisenhower turns into the Reagan Tollway where it passes over Darmstadt Road.

Ant traffic.

And your burning words. And your gold voice.

But the gods of speculation only advance. They never retreat.

Everyone dies because they cannot join the beginning with the end.

Stephen Williams is the author of four books, most recently Socrates Is Mortal (Dos Madres, 2025) and Is and Isn't (selva oscura, 2026). A chapbook, Scholar's Rocks, is forthcoming from OLAH. He lives in Chicago and teaches at the School of the Art Institute.