poem: castling.

multiple Occam’s razor could be

the shortest distance between 2 points
can’t necessarily be a straight line.
is real women have curves.
or an embrasure, an opening.

i had messed up “merlon”,
in my head, for merlot,
and could only think of blackbirds
for as long as I could carry those 2 syllables
in my head (not very.
it gets warm in the septembers
where ghosts gnaw
on long light
or short shadows
(midday, strong anglings,
abrupt places),
and so I think not too lengthily
because in the tooth.)

merlon
and crenels
are succession,
and so finite.
I think of an america
that sat on its pointiest bits
of its imaginary wall

and I think of how they tell us
that dead
and forgotten
rulers
speared people
that others might know
they couldn’t
here find mercy.
where none is to give,
there none is to be had.
and that’s reassuring:

every cruel and self-
important person that
ever lived will die
and be forgotten,

but first not loved,

until every cruel and self-
important person is
dead and forgotten.

so the quickest way
isn’t the straight and narrow — it’s the most difficult thing to do

which is to live and let live?

and we let live by making sure others get to.

did you know there’s a word for where they poured boiling water or hot coals or whatever down on invading armies and that that word is machicolation? well, anyway, merlons became less important as cannon forced forts to be reduced to rubble or lower to the ground except as decorative purpose. and isn’t that something else? our defenses will always one day just be another way of saying “I shut myself up here away from whatever I can’t make my own.” anyway, Occam’s razor isn’t the simplest explanation for a thing, it’s the one that can’t be multiplied when you might have something much more simply.

you can’t make something it’s not by wanting it to be
less than what it is.