in my heart's deserted street—

on the road and the cornucopia
of twists, and the unmindful turn:

surrounded by white-bellied,
inward-breaking, bright-***** creatures
as oblivion falls flat on the cage
rimmed with the glint of a scene's
surrounding peril.

what to make of it, now that i am alone?
the gladiolus is cut and my heart
sings winterward.

i can paint now with blood—
naked boys eaten by serpents,
a home fractured in the middle
of flightlessness. the sunlight,
the lie, the feigned sublimation of moon,
the audible death of star, felled on the floor, laughing, squirming insanely
on a waving line, water not warm enough
to bathe in, this serious multitudinously-blooded sea where i find
            
      nobody at all.
cutting the silence,
         bleeding the noise,
emptying the horizons,

     filling only the streets,
      


   but never myself.