Under a blue blanket
I taste a breath
like sweet mandolins

rolling over
like some great green wave

out on the grounds
they plucked
plebby-skinned mandarins  

untouched by noon,
stepping gingerly
over the soft roots in the grove
with garbled syntax
worried about a tax on sin
plucking all the grays
from their skulls

untouched by night
plonked in a bed
never dreaming
but sometimes
wishing to be a bed,
or a wardrobe  
or an old chandelier
or dead.

By fireplace,
growing colder,
the instinct coffee,
a soiled sorry bath,
had a foamy continent
he struggled to slurp down.

Shuffle down the hall,
shuffle off this mortal coil.

Trousers clung to the waist like
an autumn thing ready to die,
my mother about to cry,
clung to brittle hand and
brittle arm.

Her and I, in
parentheses
escorting
A coffin,
lungs lousy
with sawdust,
coughing up
black maladies in
silver spirals
to fade
In the air,
Always, and ever,
It seems,
The Christmas air.

Candles.
Must get candles.
Did I get them before?
Sure where was I before?

I was nowhere.
Biting chunks out of the doors,
lumps out of the floor.
Try as I might,
I can't leave.

Now?

Not in this.
The snow's falling sideways.
The state of it,
all nimble and white.

A lot of tears last night;
and tonight?
No great difference,
but perhaps it could be worse?
Worse than before
I was nowhere.
Among the thorns,
incorporeal save for the
trampling anvil of brambles
rambling, rumbling,
pricking against the flesh,
the skin, in it's
folds and ridges,
veins and arteries
underneath and within,
without scandal,
I wriggle and wrangle
Against those thorns,
their tight strangle,
and this incongruous
state of affairs of mine,
for now.

Must get candles.

Wanting you mouth upon me
as if sprinkled in MSG,
I kept going back to it,
as if smothered in sugar,
tongue, licking it up quick,
like on a flickering candles wick,
I'll handle the blame,
carry the weight,
'till all worries drained away
like coffee granules strained
into the bottom
of your French press,
'I'll die in Paris' you say,
'in Montparnasse, maybe,
in November,
perhaps I'll haunt
that tiny old cinema
that only holds
12 creaking seats,
and stick the springs
into their backs.'

Oh, to grow!
the quickest I did it
was in those
first few weeks,
away in the womb,
but
if I was to grow
as fast as I did then,
by 50,
I'd surpass
Mount Everest.