underneath the half bowl with a white stone
pouring light on grains of rock
thinking slow about releasing old balloons

wracking aspirations to be
caught in the ambivalence
of deciding between a sand flea and a star

reaching the conclusion
that they’re not that far apart

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.

it is in that endlessly cascading awe,
with mouth ajar,
and the soft spot behind the knee
folding sweetly
that desolation runs to hide
like a shrew,
in a meadow too dense to show its skeleton

these jests, flying through the hollows,
molded by tongue and tooth,
varying in sound in structure
through placement and growth,
sweet jests
tip horizons askew

veiled wings,
do you hear me?
you are destined only
to drift towards what illumines
the very room I lay in...

many say this is not your home-
they are wrong.

Innocent markings, innocent prints.
(Intaglio, not relief)
Can you tell them this,
can you tell everyone about this?
Please, play the bugle. Sound the horn.

I thought I painted well,
but they all look the same!

Frame me,
in the frame I’ll find variance,
it’s the border that distinguishes
two alike.

Picture it:
me and my tilted thoughts,
resting aslant upon your wall.

those thighs and hair
peeling my eyelids back to witness
water kissed beginnings,
an unfurling flower,
a pathway into you

fill me,
foreign home,
drown me,

this normal force and neglect

tell me
how it could be spring and candles...

dead-

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

i miss
your callousness, your disregard.

you are characters
top hats and all,
with gauche mustaches
wading through the falsity of a present
with flesh as old as all
that is ostensibly new
as old as dust, distraction,
and conversation

so busy now,
busy enough to forget about eyes
and hands,
rock and skin

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

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 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.”

a ball chain clean ******* through my ankle, it’s a wonderful adornment
the metal links shiver a little when i fill space with sigils evincing the idea that it’s truly something typical
a startlingly regular solution of ills, and i think the surgeons behind my solar plexus use it as an antiseptic.

when they begin their operation,
i wish i could show you

how i hear the reiteration of a phrase and its abandonment, for the fear of value & memory being coupled in a denouement
how i see a series of mesas on a steppe, staggered and stair-like, descending towards an absolute

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.

it is
the thought of a wraparound clench of the stomach
(from the dorsal side)
drilling my eyes into nothings,

feeling a child in a later stage,
the soft black cotton stretched over the emergent ****
of what was once a morula,

in absence
becoming a scientist
begging to understand through ablation,

and a priest believing that innocence molts

     in silence
bringing unintended sound.

Limp and bloodless formality.
Cotton, cotton once picked by slave hands.
Shoes still made by slave hands.
My feet are not afraid of cuts, and
my back adores the sun.

“my thread... my thread is worth more”

you say.

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.

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...

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

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.