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in the cohort of her hands, a disorder

lost dignity wrapped in the red of need
reckless and arrogant as lilies

an abundance of periphery
wavers at the sea-black hand

of hands of time of hands

rune stones
black granite spattered in stars

a slutter of language
of words of wombs

necrotic we burst
a pause of however

a narcosis of want

meander of limbs
siphoning brine-white tide

colorless-the disorder
marquis of white shadow
on seal slick waves

and the lilies,
petal outward

and in the silence
there were unknown weeks
where the flowers foundered
other bodies

there is a form in the garden
still as clay

we reddened our mouths
and still like clay

slant of a neck untattered
partitioning cerebral sea
arcing back on itself

there was a benign negligence
in the want-of flowers of lilies

vague signs of amplitude
pachyderm and small
in the grooves of lack

malnourished, contrite hands
flushed blooms of pink paper along
pink walls-flush seas of lack

vague symbols of wood and
purulent understanding a

nest of roots
dipping towards the alkaline sea

we didn’t even begin to understand
the range of mourning
becoming us

smooth white shells of elegant
weakened at the hock
distempered by the recent winters
foundering in the vacant space
between us

I mule you
through the tapestries of my desert
and am still, here
where I don’t belong

here I am spread as an excess
as an unfortunate truth
glossed by negligent hands

anxious, with the possible morning
indistinct dwindling winter
curling pink paper
along the walls of black sea
earth-tide

small weakened arrangement of groundcover
jostling in the ferns of truth

we measured the years in numerals
as with skin, ardent and ruddy

palpable lost youth

the rare wood of mistake
loosened from sleep

in the morning we resemble damaged objects
prized for obedience
at odd angles of deformation to time

in the body, a funeral
still warm

skin and stone a slender neck of atonement
for the absence of home
I wear the vale
and it weathers me
in silty slopes
in harsh-cut lines
it lopes off pieces
of my face.
it floods out my marshes
it clears me clean out
and sterile

I wear the vale
and it's worrisome folk
who take up issue.
"You're wearing the vale!
Wearying th' fields
with dead leaves, and dead things.
Don't you tell us
how to live."

Funny, it's not even sublime
how easy it is
to tell me.
and often nights? i -
i’ll have no trouble
it’s the screens that
do me in.

the fallen angel
the lithesome, spent glow
of do-overs
it just
does me in.

i am too possessed
by mercurial vapor
a dead self
at 2 and 3 and 4am
egging on, asking
“keep looking? it’s
somewhere in the archives.
it has to be.”

i promised, i promised
i wouldn’t, i promised
or I’d spend months
years, decades of life
living in the guesswork
the in-betweens
lying in the pathways
between the thought
and the reflex.

i could scroll a whole
lifetime away
in wanting.
it’s the screens that
do me in.
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