Daddy grows with the stalagmites now;
suicide off white rock
where mourning breathes staccato
with all the vibrations of a cross
as my bones wash away into
The great Sargasso.
No body can birth me now
in this dissonant space
with bluish tides stretched
to the corners of my mind
that echo deep into the crevices
the cracks the creeks
I breathe them in
like a wretched ceremony
an ode to my two thighs
that bear the weight
of outlandish theories
of what it would mean to be alive
and I wake up in the spring
mushrooms and flowers and things
bloom from the tips of the fingers to
the bottoms of the feet;
I am thawing.

dissonant from the ground that ached
of frostbite,
fractured and mistress of

the Sargasso

she birthed the thin ghost of dawn
in legato
drawing the trembling line of

her lips.

fervent, the bulbous-born sky
washed her
in fat drunken clouds of

gray ships

climaxed in the aqueduct of
erratic dusk
and emerged as deity of

bagatelle and dust.

the bones were hard to give up,
they pushed out like daisies
caressed under the hounding
heart of a copper sun.
unbridled and undried they bore
zealous arrogance of themselves,
petals dripping ****** convictions
and vibrating like awful angels.

under cruel devices they tried to
soften my bones and mold thick skull
constructed of lackluster candles
on their last flame.
days passed like doctors and white nurses
examining old wires that pray tell
the routines, the stools, the teeth.
i am their Jesus, their Lazarus.

my hearse, my sheep keeper,
my pretty things,
i become the acrobat at the
finale, the last supper,
supplementing at the **** of my
recovery. i lay my skin down for all
of you to see:  here is my breast!
my toad belly!  my glass feet!

lowering into the hum of empty bones
among a tired floor
i feel unknown
i feel shaken by drowsy notes
from unruly voices
translating parts of me
between the cries for father and peace
between the silence on my lips that kiss
at the grave digger’s feet

i left in the early morning
                                      before my own breath could
                                                                ­                    wake me.

solicitous,
the dark squeaks through,
sinks in the holes
in the lungs—the worms
found her too.

appendages of the hands
become mushrooms
grown from the soil of old hysterias
to sate the browning mind,
the eyes no longer do.

in the caricature of her boots,
the prints left in frenzied twos
are auxiliary to the compounds
of blues
that do not do

anymore than the supercilious
breath she left above ground
when she was twenty-two—
latent now in a grave
where the light can’t produce,

but the heart still beats.

I emerge at the calm before the storm
where they can't reach me by the quake
anymore.
Before the plunge I am unwithered and unworn
calling Mother at the folds where it was torn.

Cast as foetus and bag of stone
I am pulled down into a blend of effulgence
and the lungs linger in my mouth
before settling for breath between the bones;
marked by nascence and polished.

Held in an agitation of hands I am lifted
onto the summit of all things,
and she cries at the final separation
of our veins,
of our beings.

Do you know that it’s in the way
you move;
that the breath of mine outlined the heart
of yours
and my body beat as a whole.
It’s in the drumming waves that
I found myself suffocating in the
raw submission of your hands and the
gentle rhythm of the hum that went
“alive
alive
alive.”

Not that it was supposed to mean anything
in the beginning,
but that it graced the blueprints of
my veins and shook the bones
in me,
and protruded from me,
and grounded me
into a grave of every fear
and bore roots of taboo words
on my tongue.

Not that I was supposed to feel anything,
but I did.