I sit squat in the hollows
Of this massive skull.
It is where my weight resides—
Just inside the great cathedral arches
Of the brow bone.
I can look only outward at the world

From these odd windows and lay mute.
Under my door,
A draft sneaks in from a passageway,
And I wonder what now lies beyond.
I can only imagine, for there are bits of me—
Parts of my own psyche that are terribly,

Painfully inaccessible—dusty corridors left
Long untrodden to savage, rotten things
And hidden gems
Locked in safes in rooms
Closed off behind shut doors,
And here I sit,

Separate from it all—
The bad and the good,
—in this cold, dank and empty
Space lined by stone-bone walls, door fastened
From without.
Now some fiend has come

And locked me in,
Locked it from the other side.
I cannot escape. If only I had let the anguish storm through—
Felt it ripping raw against my skin—if only I had not
Stowed it away in some remote
Recess in the far reaches of my mind

To fester and to grow. If only I could now live
Without this severance from myself.
If only, if only...

Clouds of ambrosia, food of the gods,
Glow pink in this evening light—
Sweet against a velvet blue;
The sun burns the air in fiery orange,
Deeply luminescent like hot metal,
Iron cast ablaze.
I stare at it in awe until my vision goes
Spotted black and green, colors born anew
With each dark
Blink.

I have fashioned out my worry doll of you,
your hair and eyes richer, sweeter
than the darkest honey.
Now you are borne from my own hand,
you cannot leave me.

I’ve sewn in a heart to keep you warm,—
amber eyes to charm me—
moulded lips from red Edam wax
and pressed them into your cloth cheek.
They do not stay. At night,
my teardrops stain your linen dress
a briny, bitter shade.
The lines I've painted on you bleed and run.

I love you, all the same.

Dark and dankly dripping,
It groans out its low bellied cry,
Not heeding
Stop or stare of rubbernecked
Gawkers with gaping lips, ears, eyes;

Thence echoes a ventriloquy of sound--
From that great yawning throat
To dumb puppet mouths
Of men who stand transfixed by such awful
Lamentations of the Earth’s cold flesh.

Tiptoe so as not to wake the dead
Who slumber underfoot,
Their empty heads
Resting on mossy pillows of stone;

All their gelid dreams sour with time,
Beneath linen of soil and grass,
Under pounding paces of passersby.

At night, hear them snore and brood,
Chattering, gnashing bare bone gums;
At dawn, they roar and call and hoo,
They whistle through a naked cheek,
**** long-forgotten tunes
Through combs of dry and brittle teeth.

At the edge of morning--broad sky fine
And soft as peach skin--
The sun, a round, sweet skinless half--
Rilling water washes through gullied gorge,
Cresting fig root and tongue of cobbled stone,
Lazing into lacquered lake or placid pond;
Squat and pooch-bellied on flatly floating leaf,
The idle toad croaks his great guttural,
Glutted belch.

I feel keenly the quiet of many dead suns
Growing inside of me,
A biting blackness
Leaching out towards my fingertips.
It reverberates back, again
And again, swelling in my chest
Until I feel I could burst from the abundance
Of nothingness.

How horrible this could be!
Such quiet, inward rage...
The mind consumes itself
And turns to feverish delirium,
Enshrouding me in a blanket
Of bitter, tacky sweat.

In this empty, blazoned state,
I swallow worlds of men
Like syrups from a bottle.
O, the ravenous binge!

I devour it all to a hush.