charge at my viscera.
take tender care to not tip our boat,
for we will not fall,
but glide, listlessly into sea.

know what it is to thirst for nothing to surround you.
to rise and fall,
aether-bouyant through axes unknown.
which direction does your spinal fluid flow?
you’ll be uncertain.
only i know.
and i won’t tell you.

you don’t have to.

i am ebinezer el-shabazz,
staff in hand, watch me plow field and wife.
stand behind me,
father leading progeny through earth bounty born of my hand.
you must stay behind.
i will protect you from the sun.
enclose you within gossamer wings,
you will ask why light rips through, still.
i say it is because you are not in your place of yes.
“but father’s arms are always a place of yes.”
i will devour you before your mind ripens,
for i do not want you to see mine gone so foul.

there are words in other tongues
for the things we do here,
which careen voiceless from ourselves,

we don’t mean for them to.
they escape, unlearned movement
repressed by nothing save for the eyes of others.

there exist lines in another direction,
an alternate plane unseen
silhouettes of fingers running through hair.

voices occur now,
or sprout up, one next to another one,
rowhouses built between
the natural divets and gaps
in our sound.

at first the male one starts chanting,
a softer female one sings next.
she affirms the divine hollow in each of our centers.
she says the first stage of the self healing has already begun.

what happened to our pantheon?
it fell into disrepair during the night.
you ask me where we should worship.

i resign both eyes inward,
in my flesh-home i am free to be confused,
absolved from the tremors of management.

all sides of you are colliding.

pounding comes at the door.
your door. your face.
in through your lips.
breath upon your lashes
so that your eyes will feel
at home in this humid facsimile of your homeland.

what you want most is a demand for submission.
miracles granted once,
never afterward,
its own debatable occurrence is myth to us for years to come.

He asks you, “how does a forest sound.”

there’s that veiled, monastic hush to everything,
not so much muffled,
words, (in your language or others,)
that cannot be understood save for their intonation,
vague fingerprints on your pearlescent neck.

you look up and there’s lace,
weaving itself matador armed through impossible eyelets.

straw falls out eventually,
your face hollows,
and eye sockets repurposed as homes for vines,
tendrils pushing upwards,

they breach the surface of the earth and take their first breath.

when the child tugs at my apron strings,
what is my name but satan.
mistress river acid,
strip my legs of their skin with each step,
down to tendon, bone, and marrow.
i’ll wash up, limbless and parched.

we’ll stand, nubile and resplendent
beneath you while you sleep,
lobbing pebbles at your window,
while you’ll believe it to be rain,
commuting furtively into the pile of dead leaves
and crumpled tissues in the drain pipe.

you’ll ask us if we were there,
not believing voices beyond cave shadows.

we’ll lie, aged and eyelid heavy,
in sweet-earth-cupped-hands.

*~life's about to get real weird in the next ten seconds~