pour sunlight down my throat, it burns
like a whiskey secret taken to grave: my chest

is a bed of incarnadine moss
where i retire and lie, not knowing — waiting for
death or life, for
words to be purified by fire
the size of my live-coal heart;

what is there to write
out of it anyway? after all,
i am now incomprehensible to myself.

here, i confess my sins, absurd in their triviality,
but the sky hears, declares a sentence, unforgiving.
i cannot hear, for

i am now incomprehensible to myself
as i **** my nails clean of dirt, of meaning,
like a poem; emptiness is just a blank slate
not knowing where it's headed.

here, sunsets lick my bones clean — its tongue has long stopped burning
from inside the numbing walls
of a coffin: my skin is the pall draped over —
aventurescent-white under the fevered sun.