The Thief

These words came to me: 

hill walker,
the stoned remarkable,
the pathbreaker,
charred leader,
dog-faithful hanger-on,
a cramp in the morality,
egg of frightful dawn.

What fragile threads
to pull!
I set myself to pulling them,
to seeing what came loose,
spent some hours there —

and when I was done,
I said to myself,

oh, 
what they let us get away with
in the name of art.
The number of years
they don’t care if we waste,
as long as they don’t have to do it.

What we get away with
must be something
they don’t mind being stolen.
Must be something they’ve forgotten the map to,
something they don’t even know is gone,

something
they need us
to steal
and make useful.