What We Make From What Is Crushed

Lyrics

The Benguela current brings the fog.
Salt crusts on the ribs of a forgotten ship.
Here, on the coast of skeletons,
I found your canvas bag, Gary.
Tucked behind a whale's vertebra, bleached by the sun.

Your name on the tag: Green Thumb Gary.
A name for someone who coaxes life from the soil.
But inside, no seeds. No gardener's tools.
Just charts of pain, logged in a steady hand.
And the fine, metallic-sweet dust of your trade.
From Oaxaca, you wrote.
Brushing the Opuntia pads with a gentle-looking brush.
A harvest of tiny lives.

Seventy thousand bodies for a kilo of dust.
Dried in the sun, waiting for the stone.
You brushed and you gathered, you weighed them like gold.
Then the crushing. Always the crushing.
To make the perfect red.
The color of blood, the color of a king's robe.
What do we make from the things that are crushed?

I trace the lines on your charts.
A map of a body's slow defeat.
The wrist that brushed, now swollen and stiff.
The skin that touched the cactus spines, broken and raw.
Each entry a tiny, perfect red mark.
A different kind of harvest.
A different kind of dye, extracted from the self.
The price of all that carmine.

Seventy thousand bodies for a kilo of dust.
Dried in the sun, waiting for the stone.
You brushed and you gathered, you weighed them like gold.
Then the crushing. Always the crushing.
To make the perfect red.
The color of blood, the color of a king's robe.
What do we make from the things that are crushed?

Did you bring them here to be with their own kind?
The broken hulls, the splintered masts.
This final ledger of your body's accounts,
left in the place where everything ends.
Where the desert meets the sea and there is only what remains.
A testament written in red ink and pain,
surrendered to the fog and the wind.

The carmine dust, a ghost on my fingers.
The charts, rustling like dry leaves.
What do we make?
What do we make from what is crushed?