Listen to this Reading:

Kyle Tolle reading ‘Outcast Offshoot’

Walking rings around the outcast
third of all the men.
Tearing strips from their gear to
mark them as lesser ones.
Then we ate the strips out of spite
with just a pinch of irony.
They’ve become a cantankerous splintering of the glorified whole;
a mutinous and strangling growth.
We stood their dreams on their heads
and slit their ghastly necks in two.
A bowl to catch all the fluid to
reduce, reuse, recycle.
Cold compress and a drainage ditch to squeeze
out and away all the treachery
from their decentralized veins.
A horrid, pleasant smell which you have never known
until you have drained those dreams
and watched the remaining men sour.
Can you say you’ve never tasted rotting hope?
Never snipped the clutching tendrils?
Ahh a few men did outlast many others,
but an hour in a frozen lake thawed their resolve.
We see the way you glance and scoff our duties.
I’m only here because I don’t feel what you can.
I’m only here to do the job you are “too good for.”
I’m only here to trim outcast offshoot.