I. introitus

you join the procession of the
weeping daughters of jerusalem
but you
arent sure what theyre
weeping about.

perhaps they weep because they saw you
shipwrecked on the shores of
my body—
the fishermen howl, their painstakingly
hewn vessel
lost to the south wind.

or perhaps because you
charted my topography climbed up
my ******* and never came back

perhaps someone has died,
possibly you.

at your own funeral, you shed no tears.

II. kyrie eleison

at 8:56 am on judgment day

the cicadas start to
scrape against my skull

roaring like the lionesses that
rip open your chest in the tall grass they
lick your blood from their fur, pick
your bones from between their teeth and
recede, sated, into the
shade

the hyenas arrive at sun-
set and leave only
the weeds to glut
themselves
on your carcass.


III. sequentia

its all just flashes of course: the whys and wherewereyous and the
wildness in your eyes that said if someone snapped your neck i mean wrung it like a spring hen
you would still
be staring into some vision only you could
see.

sometimes it is not enough to eat humble pie.
we have to chew our cud and spit it back out and i am a
fool, a ruminant lying in the pastures waiting
to be taken one thousand seventy-four miles
home:

when you kissed me flowers bloomed from my
navel as if to say—
Yes yes yes yes yes.
blood rising behind my
lips pumping in all its holy majesty
burning metallic against my skin and i thought let me be branded by
you.

you, gift-wrapped in linen and old
spice, sunlight peeking
out through your smile lines
the surprise the perfect
O of your lips as we
made love amid the skyscrapers of cardboard
boxes as we
leapt across your mattress like buzz
aldrin like
children;

i take your hand and you lead me out the
window for a cigarette and a
better view of the moon

both are made of
paper

IV. offertorium

a.
a thousand
miles of orchard—
fruit laced with one point
oh seven four kg of powdered
kisses i havent yet given you

if you crave their nectarblood dont
blame me if you must
drink up the sea to quench
your thirst

b.   
I will sink into you like
a warm bath I will
lie back and eat mangoes and
let the juice drip
down my chin from my
fingers into you

V. sanctus

a.
i come in the name of
the woman inside whose body you were
sewn;
inside my body your seams
will be ripped.

b.
i come in the name of
the woman inside whose body you were
sown;
inside my body your harvest
will be reaped.


VI. agnus dei

the bridegroom lies
in tatters at the
altar,
reaching out to the
bloodied lamb beside him.

we cover him in
wool and
pull it over his eyes,
kissing his hand as we lower
him into the ground,
hoping to be blessed by his
blood. some of us get
drunk instead.

VII. communio

i dont know but Ive been told
that good bread and wine is
the best meal but
no bread breaks better than
your flesh no liquor goes down smoother than
your blood no
light shines brighter than your eyes
(blue moons in a scleral
sky) and when they spark like flint
and ignite my soul will you
remember to scatter my ashes into
whatever poison you drink

are you really
the kind of person who
licks a finger to turn the page I mean god
who does that
any
more

after we bought the fava beans at the
farmers’ market that we weren’t
sure how to use for dinner we
drew the shades and drew a
blank and
read the suicide notes of strangers.

Last someday I told him you know soldier you gotta stop saying please. You gotta pull the punches like get off your knees and onto your head and roll away laughing in cartwheels. Get your shoes shined your collar pressed your dogs walked, your **** ****** by women who will tell you they think you’re a riot sort of. Gotta stop counting the ghosts in the hall and the pills every week and the calories burned and the blessings. Eventually you will learn to tie your own **** tie but you’re proud of rolling your own cigars, you’re proud of remembering to water the calla lily on the windowsill. You’ve forgotten most of what you’ve read. You can’t remember the news from yesterday or was it the day before did one of the neighborhood kids get shot or did we go to war again, maybe it doesn’t really matter. Haven’t had a fruit juicy enough in six years and you gotta find a tropical country where the papayas and the sunshine make you melt into puddles and you are the rainy season, you roll ominously overhead. You think you’ll stop staying at the Ritz-Carlton on business trips, you think you’ll check into the Super 8 at three forty-two a.m. and when you open the door the ashtray’s full and there’s *** caked on the wall. When you go to the bar you keep forgetting you want a shot of bourbon or maybe a double of Scotch and you order a g&t; instead. The clouds stay grey and the sky stays tearstained. You remember playing tennis and skinning your knee when you were seven, you remember grinning the widest when you had lost your front teeth. You don’t own a single photo album. In spring when the flowers start to bloom you think you ought to have a daughter so you can read her Maurice Sendak. You’ll get shampoo in her eyes and she’ll be cross, and she’ll only forgive you when you tell her that story your college friends are all tired of by now. You have those thoughts and then you remember to wash your hands. But I said yes gotta stop being a yes-man because that turns into I do and then where are you, on the altar with the sacrificial lamb and a woman and when you slip the ring onto her finger and say this isn’t funny she says you’re a riot sort of. You wanna make it here, then you better learn to eat the locusts and ride a camel and not get angry with the scorpion in your underpants. You don’t get angry, you gotta squish his head between thumb and forefinger before he manages to jab your pecker. You are fifty-two. You don’t feel fifty-two. You don’t feel anything other than maybe an intense dislike for carob bean. You were told to be on the lookout so I said to him I said.

picture this,
o sons of judah:
arctic shallows, a
shellbeached leviathan cordially extending
an invitation to this
everfast slowdance of heart
throb lust in the
inkwell satisfaction of knowing you bleed
india blue & bone china and the moths that got
into the tent will swallow the naphtha in time;

there are parts of you that
are never clean.
yeah isn’t that
wonderful

? mark the few drops of
tequila left & a
heavy sunrise in your
swankissed beechwood
heart;

*there are parts of you that
will not be released.

don’t worry;
I can black my own boots
just fine.

one less thing for you to do.

light a cigarette
with a match made in heaven
lipstick-smudged & bent

I need you yesterday
ripped up from rope burns in my
darkling bedroom and
finally able to get out of the sack with some
semblance around four
leafing already? I asked the twilit
mid-june trees and the
cicadas in their infinite whirring
forgot to answer

all I know is that they spit
electricity like the demons spit
hair lice they
laugh you in the face

a yearsfromnow dream—
the kids playing
fifty-two pick-up
in the garage;
don’t ask me what else
you have up your sleeve, baby
that’s enough
card tricks for one night.

alessandro
botticelli said
let there be venus
(said
let there be you.)

you
running your hands down your own curves
blind;
the mirrors are all broken here.

it doesn’t matter
if you want this.
i want this
dotted i
(crossed t)
wants this

****
is this, for instance.
a pear:
bruised
muscled like
holy breaststhighs
completely inmoving
(outmoving)
breathe—
celebrate
the words
going upward to the sky and the
strawberry-red hair cascading down
it hungers
(like you)
to touch my back
gently
curl around my shoulders like your cold fingers in January

**** not
skeletal.

let there be
me.

let there be—here is where
the words stop mattering to me—
let there be caramelchocolate skin of sunlit honey tint
melting into itself on the wooden floor
(we all
scream
for ice cream)

titian and
anadyomene me
wringing long wet
raven hair
my legs are covered in salt
sand
once the sea goes dry.

almond eyes
upturned
(angular)

marvel at your own geometry.

lips of salome
drawn upward into a not-yet-smile
(cherubic)

to the women who give their thin
pale bodies
to muscular men with perfect
arms to hold them down:
i am for you.

i
with my
******* that blossom at your winter touch
my thighs
scarred by ivory teeth—no.
i
with
******* in full bloom
(orchids)
thighs sculpted by
God himself
don’t you want to make love to me?
doesn’t the world
want to make
love?


love that tastes
more metallic than the blood behind my lips
don’t you want to bite it out?
taste the sweetness behind them?
run your hands over
the elysian fields of my thighs
and the valley between them
don’t you want
my legs slung over your shoulders
don’t you want
your tongue
on my vast skin
sweat made of sugar
and salt.
(bittersweet)

you want
lips crashed against yours like
w
a ves
eyelashes sweeping your cheeks
you want
don’t you want
me
**** with nothing to cover me but my
blanket of raven hair
for immodesty’s sake!

perhaps
i am (is) small.

but
the mirrors are all broke}n here

and no you dont understand when i
tell you i want you to hold me a certain way it's not because
your elbow hits my
scapula in a way that makes it
impossible to sleep
and when i ask you to kiss me it's
not because i really need the
validation or
comfort of lips pressed hips ******
together and heartbeats
knocking like
opportunity at the door & my knees
and when i ask you
to make love to me it's not because i can't
take it ***** i mean you could just
shoehorn it in there but that's not the
point and what do you
get when you ask for

twenty pages of love notes and dust scribbles in cobwebbed
corners where you'll never look twice and
how do years curl up the way
pillbugs do when they die
accordions collapse and ribbons
lie shredded on sawdusted floors

above us you know lately i've been begging every man i meet to tell me fifteen stories
high on acid low on fuel
the fire when i knelt to feed it cedar explodes in embers writhing syllogisms of love
the way that moths feel like featherpaper shadows when you turn off the lights where do they go
on and on and on andon andonandon&onampersand;
storm and locust breeze might be the only thing we have to eat
until you can't stop
.

if i drive back to colorado tomorrow it's
not because i cant take the heat and lord
knows it's not the rain thats keeping me rooted
even if my
boots are covered in mud

it's because
right now i'm a little
fragile &
that doesnt mean dont
touch.

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.

sometimes I find
poems by accident:
I trip over them in the shower or at the bottom
of the stairs and I
apologize for my misconduct but
what the **** were they doing there Im not
supposed to be inspired
by yearsold graffiti or
words scratched into
bathroom stalls or
in the dulcet tones
of the woman on the other end of the
payphone that ate up my dollar fifty
stop ******* the sleep out
of my eyes scratching at
the scrabbleplaying part of my mind that
wants to steal other people’s words and
dress them with the playclothes of
my fiveyearold daughter
why the **** is it
that when I see strangers at the coffeeshop I can’t
just let them be strangers anymore

Feathered hair falling
Across downcast eyes; take in
forms of pear-shaped girls.

Stretch this pale body
Like a cat. On the stage (yours)
Girls hover like birds.

Do you belong here?
Back behind the black curtains
Closed doors and thick ropes?

**** as a newborn
Flat, inside-out and exposed
Beige hair made of sand

Close-holding muscled
Arms—hold this hourglass waist
To legs arms body—

Lips of dark coral
Flush from the snow (white) outside
Taste it on your tongue

He may rule over all other life
But Adam cannot rule his own wife.

I.

You can always tell the
Virgins from the way they
Glide—cerebral giddy with nectarfilled
Hearts and earlobes full of
Wax/
Wane moonshine turf if you’re not
Dying for astronomers’ loves and what makes
Ptolemy different from Claude is
Given prove:
Equal and opposite reaction.

II.

Shove knife down pork
Wasn’t so hard, was it.

III.

TWO SOLIDS INTERSECT

In a plane. In the bathroom, to be exact.
What follows is not
Essential to the proposition;
Calculate the spatial
(surface area, volume of cubicle,
conclude insufficient is <
where escape
velocity is )
useless to
resistance factor 7 [prepare
for lift-off landing
taxi

To the Bronx of course where else would I
Be on a night like this it’s raining in the parlour
Wont you step outside?

III.

anemic & half-
starved half-
sandwich
go on,
have a bite.

IV.

in arm will undulate bloodcellspouroutcantstoptoowide
are you just imagining this?
What would they tell you in school blood is
thicker than water
i’m not sure they eat
carnivores here.

CARNIVAL
festival of meat.

Flesh
LIVE
trembling
quiver SWIFT shoot through air DUCK dead swandive nosedive outplug
BOOM go the couple in the cabin
lavatory
laboratory? Rats go bang in the night

crash & burn debris over Detroit is our
favorite way to die
colorful isn’t it rainbow—
brushfire—
bruises and fire storms out and around the
populace to decimate seems like mating by a factor of ten

V; or. X^2+i(70x7)=

aftermath:

my ex squared
with me seventy times
seven
equals in
fortitude (labor-intensive)
tea costs sixpence in dallas what about
you so
integral to my
being that sometimes I wonder if you’re just
imaginary or if
what it takes to be transcendental is
beyond what’s rational or even what’s
real to me:

eight is
enough for the eggs.