baptism recurs as trauma, angels watch me
seize
i have begun to pray again
i may feel cold but i am so warm
in my throat and bones, i have a fever
by the time my vagus nerve grew up my lungs were so full i found it impossible to scream
give me love without evasion and equivocation.
no one will just speak to me anymore

peril is not what i fear, i fear your death at such a scintilla of contentment
how can i love you for such distorted exaltation, if it is love at all
she has sunned only her heart, a weathered inamorata of gangrenous pallor
timid and stark naked in the swirling moonlight, blood viscous and ripe to drink, she speaks at last:
i cannot be your lover.
in retrospect, the affair was a whim; lithe but so bitter
love is not divine will, but tenacious valor
as i have learned
as anything

have i disrupted your cadence?

when the spoon bangs up against my teeth i feel it reverberate through me, like my frequent spasms that wrack my entire body. it goes down hard. i am hacking up pulmonary blood and half-digested puzzle pieces in yet another failed attempt to **** my system. it feels like 1,000 needles trying to enter a single spot on my skin.

apoptosis; programmed cell death. it's a poor god that can't save everyone. when i press my eyes i see colors, and shapes, and stars that slam into me like a tractor trailer. my thoracic cavity caves underfoot. i bruise like a peach. i'm like a peach in a lot of ways, actually. don't ask me how. that's disgusting.

i am so dizzy and i must have vertigo
the harem girls tire me out real nice
it's all good and well in the south until someone goes and cuts their hair
please come with me
am i as you wish me to be?
our time is so short and i must be dreaming
give me some tylenol or something
the more i move the less i can
please come with me? please come with me and cuts their hair she said

belated coward on the step
shot break of dusk
twilight receding into concrete
packed on the alley wall
cigarette ash and the suffocating mist of
a lurid breath
fade.

in a dreamlike wake
time collapses
caught in the hybrid space of
ambivalent mimicry
a traumatic double which morphs recognition
into terror.

you smile
i slip into
La Frontera
and learn to hate
myself.

from what we have heard she is senile
she will smile and the sun will rise.
take her out to pink pasture, do not heed her caveat,
from what we have heard she is senile and
it is all for naught.
the war did her in, she still bathes there,
in the clouds,
in the tepid spring of father's rigorwater
the dewdrops are full of gas, they must have made her this way
(or, retrospectively, the bombs)
the old war did her in
the sun is risen over pink pasture and i can hear her seizure scream
the clear air fills with smoke and the curtain closes.