i have
blood on my hands
in more ways than one
but when you cup
each of my palms in turn and
place in them the instruments
that you use to keep death at bay i am
grateful to be holding your
blood in my hands
as your husband steadies you against
the clanging of the train, the second
strip thirsting
after your lifeblood as parched
earth after rain
and for blood money returning

a number
as though the streams
coursing through your veins
were reducible to
so many pieces of silver.

finally i am slain by
having my armpit sliced open (i feigned death the first time but
Death always knows.)

after death/
anno domini: **** me.
when you’re dead, he says,
you can **** god.

so i did.

how, then, did Death take me
by the hand (Death
in His neon green track suit)
to tell me something I already knew?

after death you can feel
only
pleasure not
pain and i guess that’s just
the cost
of a pound of flesh

an ounce
of virginal tears:
starkly they are abandoned by
the prison
industrial complex /montage it all goes
comes crashing
down like a game of mexican train
Planes crashing into trains crashing into cars &c.
into the chaos i am flung
atop a hill and there are five
rainbows, maybe more
as dozens of little silver
crosses are fired (don't get caught in the
shot up &
flipped they
land spectacularly on top of the hill. Huge
condors I mean huge
are circling. they hoist
things, possibly creatures,
up into the air but i didnt know
what they were.

a small child turns out to be the
culprit
i think through
mind control?
the other inhabitants of the
domino city ******
each other slowly
(The old lady next door donned
a green jumpsuit, snuck
into her neighbor's house,
and attempted to plant some
weird perhaps poisonous succulents
there.
knock knock—
interrupted & the knock
isn’t her neighbor

somehow she escapes.)
disposable people jump in front of a
semi. two women,
fighting tooth&nail,
make a sudden and tacit
suicide pact & jump
in front of a car together like
two virgins before
the bomb.

this is what triggers
the chain reaction of vehicular crashes.

there are phone calls.
cell phones die at critical mo-
ments. family: all three
siblings sing
(a karaoke version of) a song we didn't know at
a birthday celebration for
someone we didn’t know you
finger him and he
protests.

everything is probably a neurosis
And from somewhere comes the word "ratiocinative"

i have swallowed
the cosmos
whole.
the resultant morning
sickness informs me that
perhaps i am now its mother--
for a mother may
devour her children but never digest
them. my jaw
splits with the swallowing &
my hunger, never rational,
sets this meal in motion:
i feel it squirm in my stomach
as the acrid burning of gastric juices
sears the sphere of the fixed
stars like cigarette burns
on a tapestry. somewhere a möbius strip
rips itself in two.

yes of course
i noticed you yes
you sitting on a park bench watching
the tail-wagging hunting dog you bought to charm
us into loving you

and if you really want one of us why
challenge me to this game of
mixed doubles badminton i can't possibly win
some lose some

how can i trust you if you
have to put my plants out in the rain to
catch a chirping cricket or if you
can’t make me cry with laughter when you
make fun of my religion

you are not
the kind of person who would
tell me the rugs make your body itch so much you have to
take a shower & steal my clothes while i let the
tetrahydrocannabinol go to my
mouth (and you think
god she's beautiful and
god i'm such a handsome *******) you are not
the kind of person who would
wish people took care of you as well as i
(do or die trying) and

i have severed the hand that fed me
with these flesh-sharpened canines
of mine
and i have not had seconds yet i have not
said grace i have not
eaten the porridge from your
outstretched hands cupped
as if to catch the hail that
stings my skin and
ricochets from yours as if it were
leather and the sheath of your knife
concentrated in the firelight and the
scent of burning cedar i am not
the one with a wrung-out neck and a
doll-eyed stare if you could
pluck the feathers one by one from my
frozen flesh i would not
bat an eyelid swing
low closed and animal finish
your story and in the dewy
morning the dead pine
will crawl with the beetles you brought in mason jars

how can you look me in the eyes when
dinner & wine always ends with a
checkmate

you did not need
to shoot me with a .22
twice
in the face
]perfectly symmetrically[

in my dream
last night

to pluck out his eyes and
stain the earth with vitreous humor.

to separate the lonely wind from its
counterpart in my soul and its
thickness choking my lungs—

to escape the death grip of
the twisting jaws and
****** talons of the
sharks that rip us raw
hawks that
streak from the sky
harpies
harbingers of

to eat the flesh that
drips like candlewax from our
febrile skin

to hold morality in one hand and
maps in the other

to learn the general principles of cartography
one must commit genocide.

The tenderness of creeper vines
and garden trellises
plucking fruit from branches and
leaping with abandon into the
Dirt and the
Rocks & water—
Idyll & idolatry
fed through a tube.

I am on
Four blocks north of eagles court and
Where is a funny kind of word
won’t you stop to dust your feet off and
hang your jacket on the trees on orchard road—
This is our home now,
I told you with the early morning
dewdrops in my eyes and you
plucked them from the apples
of my cheeks and pocketed them like
diamonds.

Burn yourself onto my skin
brand me like the devil—
I quake not at the
Eruptions of hearts & other
wise blood that pulses through the stones and
trees among which we’ve gotten lost.

Tangled together, you
Weave, serpentine, in & out of
focus as the poison works its way into
my skull.