 1
climb through successive levels of day
digging through memory until I find a perfect fit
make prayer and supplication to rabbit's fur and
electric car window; these are the saving movements.
seventeen taps to brake as I pass the gate
collecting fevers for medicines
ignore the military men, magnificent in their robotic callousness
they parch the pavement for shadow
leech cellular poisons through its stinking, wandering cracks
these, then, the saving moments
these gifts are mine for free -- unbidden
 2
her lips parted in a tight, excited whisper
that fed itself smoothly into space:
"...look at me!"
hung there
in angled, tantric display
her freezing edges surrounding by soft mouthfuls of
cold air
willowing pockets of helium scrubbing skin for this
pinned angel.
majestic,
static,
staccato,
stuck:
doomed.
transfixed would be a favor
stuttering,
twitching
a mind's eye could afford her
skin peeled back in smooth, exposed triangles
for fleshly insect wings
 3
it was two weeks ago.
i remember: you were laying on the couch
in the dark christmas warmth
i got a little drunk and
touched your face
the vodka was forgotten
i punctured the expectancy
there was no sound around us
though you cried
my violent escapism kicked in then; i was maddened to
tear us off the face of this killing fucking joke
and be away safer
i wanted to live in a hovel with you
in the mountains of russia
i wanted to eat dirt for sustenance and drink off the frozen woods
it's okay that you changed your mind.
i'm not angry.
hurt, but know this: i was ready to dispatch all the powers
in hell and piss in god's necrotic little eyes at the same time
to bring you back to here from where you ended up,
and i still am.
4
she is far too soft and sweet:
not to put too fine a point on it, there is a kind of armageddon almost
hiding in her eyes.
and where she forks, the scent of decay and cocoa butter
what is a smell to the brain is a texture to the mind
her fingers like yew trees spread grasp, show rubbing fingerprints raw
and soaked in salt
delicate money
"if you can take it
why don't you break the necks of birds?"
your special stun
you lay, disarming me
for a moment imagined you screaming
(...how charming you were in reality)
tender and unwitting
this otherwordly exchange of currency
prophetically fueled, arc the shot
and see you take it, arching
foolishly magnetic, on a layer-thin fold it is to be received:
like a lover
lay like a cat
glistening with pride and satiated
had you all day,
had some special piece of you
turned under a knife,
turned smoothed as wood, dark,
saliva an agent to swell full your cellulose
the little monk's cells at your core
i spent all day at this,
broadening my death instinct
lord, i am a sloppy fuck
i spent all day learning how a woman cast a devil's shadow
 5
it was probably a mistake
to put on the cure at this point
it took more than a
year for me to chew
through that umbilical
but then I could spit
the detritus back in
your face
& that was almost
satisfying
sometimes there was a softness to you, i admit --
when mastered by a misstep
or martha was your idol
a charged wind could stir the unstable vane of your madness and
leave the arrow strained toward an untrustable 'mothering' for a time.
remember fucking everywhere we could, clubs, bathrooms, in driven cars,
our
friends scandalized or gladdened?
your skin held heat like a sleeping animal.
there were many things I didn't tell you.
and did you know
fully half the time now
i've started referring to you in my head
as tara
(apparently you've won acclaim as the other whore)
before i catch myself and correct it
something tells me you'd appreciate the irony in that
years from now i'll only have hatred for you, too
caleb's pink wind-up bunny surfaced in my things an hour ago
and went out with the trash immediately after
Half-trite and half-poignant, it was only funny for a second
 6
This is world.
This is what you inherited before you were sentient
and before you were either ready or responsible.
This is hate.
Ready up.
You're spilling lovingly out of a club at two-thirty on another
morning,
the promised heat of a certain female on your arm and in your stomach,
beer and vodka doing their guesswork on your convictions.
You overhear someone nearby mention 'original sin' in low tones, and you
laugh,
because you know worse than that:
featherless wings pluck unkindly where you close your eyes
The machine you thought was you throws hard errors against
your mind
scrapes harshly at what you held as courage.
You don't mind making your own guilt.
Nor do I.
 7
toward the ending of my
sweltering day
my constitution, hot
and spiking, shook loose
of its mooring,
full of pull away and regret;
even the slender deaths
my strengths request
come jittering and somehow
physiologically unwelcome
i'd ignore the ever-mounting drain
granting me infeasible leave
to wake and wake,
skipping across one tiny
stretch of rest
were I given pause to think
 8
we crouched in the dark and drew sleep from the shadow;
her nylon laminate sheathing
discarded for the moment, her
body vibrated gently, naively,
bravely at the end of my tongue.
wishes come and break, and breaking, are gone,
killed flat in this enthralling silence.
want to hear the prophecy sleeping in your veins
find the source of your history
spinning out your days like mayflies quick and wondrous
ally myself with its cause
 9
just beneath the
closest layer of your
skin
listening at the graveyard coupling
of flesh and flesh
where
your cells push their
dead & dying
and the quick flitter
of your nervous blood
pushing wanly through
Your weakened, haughty veins,
trying to react with your core
I'm foretelling
a future shape:
i have an arm thrust over your curved back
my breath flowers against your
throat's delta
 10
was at the morning again
crying at banalities
like a knee-skinned little girl
and things i had imagined
responding to machines and low-earth-orbiting satellites
deconstruction:
i was all there when I watched your
head explode into stars
you were all wise,
as women will be:
skinny artist elf, strange-gotten syllables
at your
lips, angel-pointed, lustre-thin, your eldritch brow a
pale-skinned gift no god
ever
intimated, nominal isotope to a worthless figure
disintegrating whore, written in
pseudo-code, a method to escape
inconstant variables in her crackling madness -- deftly avoided
or not,
strong and foreign defacer of these values,
half-knowingly tinkering with my super-structure
from
the other side of the continent, her own Hellenic supernova
coalescing into maddening vacuum, launching her ships
while
corporate america sleeps through the blaze,
fourthly, flesh not to my flesh, brightly-eyed,
the
sister-bullet in this chamber,
not an
angel in hebrew after all, only a lamb,
and
tellingly so,
adoration is a fortune, realize:
your mother died the moment you were born out of her.
|
'
