let me drip venom in your mouth,
poison your lungs, corrupt your thoughts,
break your limbs,

let me drown you under the waves of desire,
love me with your wrists bound,
pretend this is a dream

and learn your lesson now

It’s funny really
How I know the names of my poisons
Most people never know what they drank
Until it’s too late
But I take mine with food twice a day
Maybe that means I’m mad

on the day of the double funeral I stand
waiting for the rest of me to die,
I am that I am but I harbor a bad disease.
i should be anywhere and be doing anything other
than what i am.
because before Abraham was i am
standing in the empty quarter
reading a funeral manual on the
day of the double sky burial.
i’m poisoned off my pouch of yesterday’s mana.
gums are bleeding this is yesterday’s daily bread.
men cannot live off bread alone
and the jackrabbit horde is coming home
our own locust plague for a new Sahara.
i stand with a hangman’s fracture
lost on the old sermons in the sand.
following my family’s footsteps sadly in the wrong direction,
lost among the marking rocks.
snow leopards of the black blizzard and
my poison pouch of mana.
drowning in the fires we cook a stray dog
reaping all the whirlwinds I sound a 12 foot Tibetan horn
on the day of a double funeral -
perched in the dwelling of the solitude.

hate born of love
like Poison leaking through
the petaled veil

❦

i am tethered to my sickness—
brain worms and implacable affinity
soil and blood like strings on
careful fingers, knitting precariously
the loose ends, every alteration
another implication, pull hard enough
and i am tightly bound to peril
deeply fused into your liquid mercury
insensate though that may be
unliberated; as my mind is a metal can
rust and decay so effervescent
an empty clanking of unlinked adages
circulating alluvial expectations
throughout all of my weeping nerves
and stillness, if i were still able
pain could only wake me for so long
before attachment becomes a
blunted weapon, and your infection, my
bereaved maladaptive paradise.