Stop

The ghosts of ghosts float around me
Wearing their old animal masks,
Dreams stuck to scraps of personas
Where otherwise faces would be:

Fox and coyote, elk and crow,
Raven and mouse and confusion,
Wavering, boskish contortions,
The things that are but never know.

The deities requiring trance
And sickness to come in glimpses
Are not harmless apparitions,
Are feral thoughts that, broken, dance

At night on the grave of the day,
At dawn in the dead coals of fires,
At noon sprawling drunk in green shade,
At sunset as time slips away,

Little skittering souls that hop
And plot in the wake of minds passing,
True poems, neither human nor beast,
Showing stories don't end. They stop.