THE SCAR OF WATER,
AGAIN IN THE WINDOW-
A STREAK BECOMES A SCAR OF WATER.

And what foul mouthed moth
borne a foul cocoon,
carried his tilted wing:

I, star speckled speech,
perforate an eyelid-
and hang the foolish nail of Christ's hand
from the slack in tow,
dodge the death addled rut of a *** hole,
in a careening vehicle there, for me,
to cling to life.

You are a lampshade,
a breast, and a trumpet-
OR
A reed,
and handkerchief.

Every candle is a rhapsody built of your breath.

NO, no- you are a body, with a midline, dispersed
and given function to move throughout and with intention.
You are an extended substance, where I, divisible, become
the cry of a boiled lobster.

I would love to count all of your eyelashes,
and sleep next to you.

My voice was harsh because I convinced myself that you were hiding!
Somewhere tucked in a box of rosewood, peeled at the corner and latched with brass.

I carry- I work to carry like a great mule of the Earth,
Atlas, the mule, myself...
Everything of you should belong to me,
but SHOULD is so foolish,
always so foolish... I SHOULD be a consequence of your spit,
some tiny droplet of mist that floats freely from your lip as you talk,
BUT I am your light, instead.

I want to unwrap your chest, tenderly,
swim in it. I love
your nose.

To ground this fear in love-
This sleepwalking ant made of thorns and a tender pulse of the middle *****:

TO GROUND THIS FEAR IN LOVE.

I thought of you as a mother today, as any other day, I thought of you as a mother. I read a poem about a decades long relationship being sundered and thought of yourself, twenty years into motherhood, deciding that I am a sleepwalking ant made of thorns.

My father died after the divorce,
though his body kept on living,
and I have fear that must be grounded in love.
And love, here, so basic.

I want to razor-hatch my grandfather, his father- for laving womb with his seed-
And I want to witness the creature coming out of my mother,
to see the clung-rag of my bone-
my flesh,
given to the floor
to look at the floor  
   and remember that the floor is also a wall

To brandish and damage the Whitmanian sheen:

Can no one tarnish this?
Must anyone pollute it?

It is why I have taken you out into fields-
To make the possibility drift away from empty sight.

Does it not bother you?

To see a mismatched face,
a scrunched lip or sideward glance,
an awkward gait;

Does this not bother you?

I do not think it does.

I live in a rusted compass-
The jittered movement of a world of people opposed to me, fundamentally,
and if they do not appreciate some superficial charm, a quick wit or jawline, then I am a burial ground.

Does this make sense to you?

My shell- who I AM and what I AM in myself,
Is everything of myself in this world: do you understand?

This complaint is a feminine one- a constant feminine one and I do not understand-
it is why I have no patience for the division of quarrel when it allows a space for a will,
and no patience for women when they are born such beautiful creatures.

Do you not understand this?

Everything constitutive of the feminine- be the term bastardized in logistical torment or made to lay prostrate at the altar of the Wesleyan Thesis- is condensed and made perfect in the fold of an elbow, or the basic weakness felt in opposition to the disgusting brute that is the man.

I am a disgusting brute. I have a gut and I have hair on my body. I am a machine- the secondhand contrivance of a protective god. A monument to gestation.

Even when I ***, in brief movement and in brief moment, I am but a moving forth- out of myself and into another to be held, and this action (so crudely overlooked as to be made the absent declaration of an ALGORITHM) reminds endlessly of my transience;

And my transience IS ME-

In the womb I am a decision- behind the first action, the basic action that is womanhood.

There is no reading about this:

The problems of order, systems of order made unto systems of order, are for themselves, and as such exclude the scrunched lip of the passerby- they extrapolate from them an unrealized intention and fold into them as a torment…

And in the fold there is ruin,
and life conditions for patience in the ruin-
to be greeted with anything ‘other than’ is no different than being granted love in a passing dream;

And in the fold there is hope,
I am conditioned through and through, surely, to become something other than myself.

There is no medication for this-

No return to the unconditioned, or
Escape in the unconditioned,
only Logic in torment for the the significance of the interplay between a slit and a rod,

And the gentle retardation of Women
And the gentle retardation of Man

Made into a choice of scarves and lugnuts.

III. “LOOK AT THE BIRDS OF THE AIR; THEY NEITHER SOW NOR REAP NOR GATHER INTO BARNS”––UNCONCERNED ABOUT TOMORROW. “CONSIDER THE GRASS OF THE FIELD –– WHICH TODAY IS.”

LOOK NOW:

A bus.

In the seat near her, of wired silver hair, of wilting lilies- a face that is a spattering of moles, the teeth an inch from necessity: Brianna. What creature is this? What torment? The nature of yourself is a nature of no other- you are uniquely ugly and I have prayed for and forgotten you.

This is only the presentation of your thighs
with hopscotch etchings and clipped denim…  

You crawl from the ramshackled crevice of timber and shingle,
from the carpet,
  To meet me on vinyl-
and teach me a pity of the circus.

A backwards promise tied through in pittance-
an empty confrontation
closing in faces stern and the usage of shoes
at the end of some chapter,
some example of life.

It is a things beginning,
a wandering womb that is myself,
turned gangrenous with twisted mark
and feature, crawling up into my chest
To make home with all other things motivated by the cloying and eyeless angel of the house, all things falling to the usage of shoes.

Natura, as in birth,
deceiver, material fact in perceptual fiction;
to which the bird sings and flesh returns, shallow earth roiling with worms in mud;
your body is mine- on great gusts you carry my breath.

Your skin, parsed, has become a word of my soul; a flesh folded dove unclasped in freedom from a party trick,
soaring outwards on dreams turned luminous through countless lies and premonitions, unfurling in worldly frenzy.

You have inveigled me in flattery to become an exertion-
an eye, an ear, a mouth, a hand, a nose, a science;
to study the motion of which I am indifferent consequence, to crystallize the miracle of myself in my skin-
to learn and forget.

People like imagery and trinkets and things-
they abide by the boundaries of themselves and move onwards, emboldened by this recognition- this worship

but I am a pike made of flesh-
bloated like a fish,
wretched, unknowing in mirrors.

This world is my species-
my species indirect,
as bloated, as wretched.

The beauties I find I create,
and even then I hate them afterwards,
I hate too much for the sake of my love-
my embarrassment.

a rough bit of it all
torn about the tinged straights-
a bridge to build,
a brick to lay,
another day gone by.

the ornaments inside my house no longer serve amusement-
my clothes mismatched all habberdashed
rest sullen on my skin,
the glow of screens tear at the seams of mildly sane perusement-
and I cannot drink away the ghouls with bucketfuls of gin...

what to do?
o, what to do?
another click or brushstroke-
a painting made for debts unpaid
to some stew of soul and self...

I’ll wrench some “purpose” from the pulpit and stuff it on a shelf.

dead-

you are dead. twice over,
curled- in repose
without goodbye.

i miss
your callousness, your disregard.

living sidelives
in light rain-

between a cigarette and a dog too old
to know what it’s barking at...

a man silvershorn about the hair
and the soul; begetting half of a life and a life’s half-ending.

a question placed between the asphalt cracks, beside the flecks of ash...
what does his heart entreat?

(such foul anatomical inaccuracies abound
in this metaphor for the seat of all feeling.
it can be an axis you know. emerging from somewhere within the hippocampus, then the pituitary gland, down to the kidneys, ******, or thyroid just to circle all around again. it recruits and unfolds- projecting outwards to come back unto circuits for grounding)

I cannot know.

Shackled in ambition,
sweet loves tied through in
sorrowful yesterday’s
searching for warmth as in birth;
a thousand becomings,
a thousand boundary lines.

some talk of a foolish necessity in nature and hierarchy to beckon
and tear a flame from its comfort in chaos,
to wrench its light into shadows it did not deign
to brighten...

Somewhere a matchbox is swept out from under the leg of a table, and in newfound contact with the ground the whole floor comes crashing unto itself...

I do not know what causes a body to revolt:

"The N-terminus of EWS/FLI1 retains the prion-like transactivation domain of EWSR1. This allows EWS/FLI1 to both bind RNA polymerase II and recruit the BAF complex. These interactions change heterochromatin to euchromatin at EWS/FLI1 DNA-binding sites effectively generating de novo enhancers
The C-terminus of EWS/FLI1 retains the DNA-binding domain of FLI1. While wild-type FLI1 recognizes an ACCGGAAG core sequence, EWS/FLI1 preferentially binds GGAA-repetitive regions. There is a positive correlation between the number of consecutive GGAA microsatellites, EWS/FLI1 binding, and target gene expression.
The core motif of ETS transcription factors includes a GGAA sequence. EWS/FLI1 may bind to such sequences with greater affinity than the wild-type ETS member disrupting the normal regulation of ETS target genes."

I did not like the phonics- I did not like how blunt the nomenclature was. It was ugly and guttural, full of dissonant clips of the tongue and glottal propulsions. I am sorry I could not remember the names- even if they were ugly.

I suppose you never think of me, and in your current cataclysm drift away from my person evermore. Nevertheless, I will write this- not as testament but as a reaction:
I am sorry.

There were insecurities placed inside of you by your caretakers- things surrounding intelligence, direction, and lechery. I hope that they will relinquish their scruples to your fate, and that perhaps you will see a glimmer of love as snow drifting downwards to blanket you in numbness when you choose to go outside.

I watch dreamers turn to terror
in acts of unbecoming; laughing  
till’ they come across some caesura
that caps their throttled love
shifting into stone.

In observance I sing with a tongue plucked from centuries back,
as an attestant to melody and motion
for those that forget nature
is always dancing.

A forest is only idle
when we’ve lost our time for rest-
in rhythm it sips joy up again
and sheds it in sweat upon a stage of itself
for nothing more than color
and the song of an insect.

I will say,
but my saying is the same as all other things said:

man can be boiled in a ***
till nothing shows but his bleached white bones;
collect a few and build an effigy
to soothe your soul to sleep.

that counterfeit death
formed as a life of empty digits
will haunt you hollow
and mark your children too;

they will never look
upon bags of bridled bones
as hopes to be carried;
but as hallmarks of a blindness
placed squarely in their sight.

these beasts have been wrangled
ages ago,
but the sneer of the hunter persists.

animals will be tracked and traced
till form becomes blankness
and their corpses return to the ground...  

then the sky will laugh
in great gusts bellowing down;
because it has no word for forward.

sadly,
i believe,
a word can only approach color.

my masquerade of violet
exists as the consequence of red
and aquamarine.

and i see no likeness to
“vivacity” and “sorrow”.

“children” and “gravestones”
might be a bit better,

but they are not red and aquamarine.

I think cancer
is a metaphysical condition,
and that apoptosis can reconcile Freud.

I do not wish to bring beauty into death,
but passivity into reunion-

and to remind that, perhaps,
this is a game
of tension.

This is not familiar.

This ground upon which I have graced
and spun drama
to placate the self and its itches
has grown dry.

No longer does the brook sing to me
in its ceaseless fawning...
it is quiet patches of grass
strewn about like gravestones.

The wooded perch where a falcon
sat to whistle danger in my ear
is a husk cradling pinecones
that couldn’t find the ground,
and my eyes know not doubt
nor reprobation.

but the clouds
are the same.

it is unique to us
(pontification)

the way in which animation
attaches character to absence-
(coincidence)

how song compels memory,
and how specks shift to color.
(abduction)

Today, like other days,
I lay in result.
(in a tomorrow I will rest inside an Eonothem,
reborn in unconformity)

and think of how
(felicity)

Extremophile
is used as a descriptor for organisms
that can fold proteins efficiently...
(method)

and I am rutted in stone,
but I love lava all the same.
(human)

do you know this?

you,
sandalwood skin wrapping into a magnifying glass and its twin
resting fixed on a bridge between your eyes- a crooked tooth
living as a tiara
purposed for the interruption of symmetry in a smile that breaks on the crest of a sun breathing sight into
all that was lost in a night too dark for an adolescents chagrin to be crammed between stars.
you,

I love
as a desert filled with flower petals
moved by wind and the whispers of ghosts-
with my heart dispersed as a constellation
held together in blue light.

I give you toys
to prop and position into forms
frozen halfway through pirouettes,
and a light for showing the
stillness of a shadow stuck in
beautiful contortion.

I rest as a creature half dead from
eating the sun with his skin,
showing trinkets and colors to toddlers in high heels and keeling over at the thought
of ever pulling myself towards something more than.

I rest unbent
in the dale below,

where birds perform aerial dances
in the after-light of a sleeping sun.

Every night
my eyes break

as heedless air carries my body
above a cotton sea
into strips of honeyed sky.

Every night
I ask the stars

still hiding

how to fall
and see the earth.

I wanted to learn

so last night my fourth grade teacher
tore my eyelids off

and sat me near a television screen
that showed my mother dying
over and over
and over again.

I left as a cavity
of a boy,

collapsing at the sound of passing cars

as I searched for a payphone where
I could speak to the static about Gabriel.

(where is he?)

When I look at my brother and father

I beg for my eyes to be caressed until they’re scarred

with every daytime matinee
and curtsy on the train platform

that built me into this mosaic
of a “man”.

you,

stitched of love
and to be loved
of death and in-between,

you,

a sublation
for frailty
becoming diamond
in the eyes of forgiveness-

evanescing
on the cusp of evergreen
with magpie beauty.

though with due reverence
i kiss the graves of dead poets-

the breathing kind must disassemble an atom to gain a fleck of praise.

no i don’t like it when they say
“i let you hurt me”

try:

please
treat me to porridge filled with kerosene
and rebar,

i’ll let you
drag a razor across my gums

if you kiss those fickle carmine streaks
that dribble from my tongue every time
i find the audacity to speak to you,

tint me,
tint me with spit and break me into cannon fodder,
princess

i know that mirrors
and **** pipes are real,
cobwebs too.

remind me that i’m not a nag
and i’ll build you a boat made of
frilled marigolds & thornless roses,

i’ll float us along
and talk about how

it upsets me
when i see pieces of my father
mix into basic interactions.

my fear will leave
to go sit next to triangles in heaven

and i’ll wait for a scarecrow from high school that i loved but never slept with,
i’ll wait and think of your eyes.

4 A.M My Lai;

in the lowlight
colors move off my skin at different speeds-

i’ll smear them into filth,
a vignette
plastered and permanent,

and beg
for my face to be scanned like a barcode.

no more ligands
uptakes or exchanges,

just a wall,

a wall erected inside of me,
that rejects all attempts of a raze.

poetry is dumb to me
as it sits beneath this ache-
this ache that becomes my body.

i’m a ***** in an alley,
as bold and as beautiful as a newborn child;

throwing pennies at the feet of
****** addicts and billionaires.

i don’t know why i love searching for food in waste bins full of burnt-out cigarettes,

or why electricity is  
always running
underneath every scabrous sheen of skin-
i’m starting to think that hearts and brains are cliche.

when i was young
my cliche
started quaking
at regular intervals

i wished it to be a water balloon
so i could drop it on the sidewalk
like a kindergartner.

now it reeks of chemicals-

i’m soaked in ethanol
probing all the people that pucker at the smell.

questions undue
stuffed folly into the throats
of mathematicians, priests, and poets alike.

i nearly burnt all of their books,

but a paper boy with wide eyes greeted me at seven o’clock on sunday

and untied a parcel
with careful young hands.

i saw his legs shake
and thought yes,

god is tension;
a string
with both its ends pulled.

i tear into bookshelves
as if i only eat peaches
to crack my teeth on the pit,

yet you have a dog-eared page

stained with scrawled hearts,
folded and flown across the schoolyard
by a boy walking circles
round a swing set.

yes i picked tulips with you when i was young-
when i never went past eskimo kisses
or knew about roots and ****** falls.

every day i carried needles in my stomach...
i wanted to stitch our skin together.

now you’re landlocked in the rustbelt
counting change all day-
i’d buy you a plane ticket if i didn’t look like saint jude.

i suppose i should
treat you suchlike a sweater
i don’t know whether to fold or hang,

plant seeds in foreign gardens
and carve our initials
when they turn into trees

or scatter your ashes on the throughway,
near a city you’ve never seen.

this morning I felt myself a bird

and stumbled into the pane of glass
that shields my shower;

for a brief moment

I became a limp body standing up,

with knees folded at acute angles
& elbows obtuse,

begging the ferryman
to float my feathered corpse into
the cleansing chamber.

he muttered assent
in my own voice-

and all the water in the atmosphere
poured directly through a hole
in the crown of my head,

it filled the hollows of my bones
and I no longer took flight.

I’ve spent the whole of this evening
drinking bug repellant and
wrapping my brain in gauze

because small shifts of her feet are registered on the richter scale
and my chest
is crowded with stalactites.

there are paintings inside of me;
a maudlin girl with porcelain skin unfolding onto velvet,
bleeding into other men.

her crying gave me tinnitus,
now my ears leak silver-

their canals are comprised of melted
nickels forgotten  
in the center console of her car.

come winter I’ll cast a ring,
though I’m terrified of snow.

It’s always sedatives during hangovers,
until every blink feels like pouring dust on a patch of dry grass in the sun-
bleached white.

I am offset;

an old railcar piled with pages,
shunted forward a few
inches every Saturday or so.

my mouth fell off on crooked tracks,
now I speak through rust-

corrosion carries all the stories never told,

a burnt patina
imploring passengers to pore through
its contents
till their hands are herringboned with paper-cuts.

it always ends in locked jaws-
with tetanus in their blood.

when I awaken
I extend my finger
towards a panel of dancing light-

did you know that its veins were torn from a mountain?

a whole hierarchy of angels
living inside the earth
were turned to transistors

so that my letters
could glow in your hands.

when I learned this
I began sleeping beside a stream,

in the places where I could watch
wires dance-

beneath wooden pillars and their flimsy black arms
whispering secrets in permanent embrace.

every night I would dream  
to the forward noise
of churning water;

of fluid drifting through the air unseen
or pouring from life long past-

terraforming
for the maintenance of symmetry.

I asked
the second hand of a clock

what exactly makes it tick,

it told me that I’m blind
every fifty milliseconds;

oh,
I swear I’ve spent whole days
in between the twitch of an eye.

I asked the psychologist the same,
it yielded nothing-

the paper proposed that pupils
scale with difficulty,

mine swallow nebulae
during the easiest of tasks.

I asked away,
but realized in a breath

that those apertures are
little girls and little boys

bundling desire
as twigs to use for tinder.

I heard on the news
that the Apinae are disappearing,

“the what?”

“the drones darling, bumblebees.”

“and?”

“you should decorate your hair with daffodils; the yellow offsets the onyx.”

you thought
I looked at symbols too often

I thought
you were thirsty for color

“you have never mentioned dying
bees before this moment.”

“oh, up until today,
I never knew that they danced.”

unfurl,
for this body can be unworldly frenzy.

sweet child
barebacked in the glimmering half-light;

adorn your skin

with shell and bone,
with coiled vines and fig leaves-
you love equally
gardens and caves.

before the clouds became
contemporaries,
your arms were flesh

athirst and empty;
lurching
towards sugary fruit.

I am unborn,
clawing through clutter
and encouraging my salivary
glands to push moisture
through the will of hypotensive
medication.  

Laying next to my betters,
begging to die of a heart attack
while I *******.

It’s nothing like falling asleep next to someone.

I am nothing
but half-breaths lent as largesse to
a hypothetical togetherness
hurriedly collected in the night
and burnt into reels of film.

I ascend ladders,
my favorite has its base resting
in my spine,
I climb it up,
always up-

only to find lacerations  
in the fibers comprising my thigh,
and a lovely image of
a love that is not.

you can see it in the air,
in the emerald green carpets
and announcers writing invitations
in foundation hand,
all inked in crimson.

even on
the slumped shoulders of
scientists and poets
toting epaulettes
on t-shirts.

in the bricks,
held in place with pumice and porous stone-
there’s that fine and coarse aggregate
refusing to crumble and weather.

Over there
that one is speaking Portuguese
to a lamp post,
telling it all that is known about
the heroic epics of the Donghu people.

Across the sidewalk
one is drunk,
stumbling and smelling of ***,
muttering obscenities at the gutter.

it’s always raining pamphlets,
and in the margins
they say to make sure
that you keep your windows closed.

I thought
you could explain
the philosophy of vacuum
and Spinoza
through chattering teeth
and lips too numb to form labials.

In winter;
whenever your face
began to freeze
I wanted to remind you
about occasionalism and
quanta.

I wanted to tell you
how your eyes
could be heat and god.

If everything is political
I suppose I’ll distance myself
from everything;

I’ll go back
to become rapt
with Eleusinian mystery,
and begin dancing among
pillars and fluted blocks
at the propylæa-
suitless and light.

The pattering of peoples steps
was the only music
I ever wanted to hear
anyways.

that pharmacy could be
a tree,
spitting small colorful seeds
down the throats of kids
that look at concrete too often-

a tree
with budding fruit
clipped and stuffed
into a sunrise-colored cylinder
by a man
dressed in a cassock,

and I could be
a catechumen
waiting pliantly
inside the trunk,
whispering prayers
to the wood above my head.

A.C Hume called injury his own;
he became the ambassador of
the olecranon,
and died a pedant mending bone,

how many fell
before he entered abduction
and set his stern hands
on ailed elbows?

how many could tell you
what such an injury was called
before he laid claim
to the fruits of misfortune?