Beauty is Imperfection

We bounce on the Siberian ground
The snow absorbs the laughing sound
Your breath has shards and your voice is weak
And when the soil breaks, its gas will speak

Of the sometimes lips of Siberian birds
On their grocery rounds, speak in minor thirds
They too act with a unitasking brain
The gas on which they float is sane

Find its idiom in childish lungs
Stentorian notes and Götterdämmerung
Mingles and cocktails with poisons in the air
And the masses of people who once lived there

Gas gives its spirit, its spirit released
Its valediction, the ocean its priest
And when its moment of flower has ceased
The human hole seeks to close in peace

Find its idiom in childish lungs
Stentorian notes and Götterdämmerung
Mingles and cocktails with poisons in the air
And masses of people who once lived there

And it got too hot for us to live there
But our letters remain, its past we share
The flowers open, the flowers stare.

(Lyrics to “Methane Moth,” from the new Salon de la Guerre album From Sour to Cinnamon.)