Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were full
Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
With thorn ******, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.
We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.

When Bluebeard told his bride there was
a closet she must never see
She painted deep inside her head
A portrait of how it might be;

She saw a wonder chamber there
with Baroque pearls and curios,
with sequinned birds and spiky shells,
and monstrous fish and cameos.

And when her husband had to leave
to make a voyage 'cross the sea
he said she might use every room
and gave to her the master-key


The chambers here were many, all
with costly silk upholstery
With works of art and silver plate,
and porcelain, jewels and ivory

He showed her then another key
but told her, glaring, to beware-
To never use it, for it opened
up the closet 'neath the stair

His bride just laughed and said that he
could trust her even with his life
That he might rest assured that she
would never be a spying wife


2

So now alone, she asked her friends
to come and keep her company
To gossip in the courtyard where
they all could sit and take their tea

A courtyard sweet as heaven's door
where roses smelt of cherubs' sighs
And peacocks trailed their rustling tails
of tasselled silk with turquoise eyes

The fountains chimed like chandeliers
each tree sang like an aviary
Ripe fruit hung thick from every bough
and all was just as it should be

But Bluebeard's bride could not discard
the baleful warning of her groom
Nor could she cast out from her head
the phantom of that hidden room

And though she knew that it was wrong,
she sprang up quickly from her chair
Then took the silver closet key
and hurtled down the spiral stair
3
She held the key with quivering hand
and turned it slowly in the lock
But as she did, she met a sight
that sent her reeling from the shock

She'd entered now that nightmare land
where Kraken loom up from the deep
And you no longer understand
if you're awake or fast asleep

That half-remembered childhood world
where goblins lurk beneath the bed
Where witches fly around at night
and everything is on its head

For there, all caked in ruby blood,
a woman lay upon the floor
And peering round the shuttered room
she saw at least a dozen more

Their necks gleamed dark with clotted gore
like pomegranates split apart
While others had been hanged on ropes
or stabbed with daggers through the heart

At which the girl let out a shriek
that could have woken up the dead
And dropped her key upon the ground
amidst the blood of coral-red

Then picking up the key again
she stumbled 'cross the crimson floor
And, choking from the fetid stench,
she raced to slam the closet door
4
Her ordeal though, had just begun
for Bluebeard came back suddenly
And when he did, he told his wife
to show to him the closet key



But then he saw her bloodied hem,
that glare of terror in her eye
And knew she'd peeked inside the room
where he had told her not to pry



"The key," he said, "is streaked with blood
You've poked about inside that door.
Well, Madam, you shall join my wives
and rot with them forever more."



He drew his sword out from its sheath
and held the blade above her head
"Please give me just a little time,
so I may pray to God," she said



"You went against my word," he growled
"You shall not have one minute more"
But, as he gripped his sword to strike,
he froze, then tumbled to the floor-



His wife could scarce believe her eyes
and wept with joy at what she saw
But still she took the sword and plunged
it through his heart, just to be sure.

This door you might not open, and you did;
  So enter now, and see for what slight thing
You are betrayed. . . .  Here is no treasure hid,
  No cauldron, no clear crystal mirroring
The sought-for truth, no heads of women slain
  For greed like yours, no writhings of distress,
But only what you see. . . .  Look yet again—
  An empty room, cobwebbed and comfortless.
Yet this alone out of my life I kept
  Unto myself, lest any know me quite;
And you did so profane me when you crept
  Unto the threshold of this room to-night
That I must never more behold your face.
  This now is yours.  I seek another place.

--To Elizabeth Robins Pennell


'O mes cheres Mille et Une Nuits!'--Fantasio.

Once on a time
There was a little boy:  a master-mage
By virtue of a Book
Of magic--O, so magical it filled
His life with visionary pomps
Processional!  And Powers
Passed with him where he passed.  And Thrones
And Dominations, glaived and plumed and mailed,
Thronged in the criss-cross streets,
The palaces pell-mell with playing-fields,
Domes, cloisters, dungeons, caverns, tents, arcades,
Of the unseen, silent City, in his soul
Pavilioned jealously, and hid
As in the dusk, profound,
Green stillnesses of some enchanted mere.--

I shut mine eyes . . . And lo!
A flickering ****** of memory that floats
Upon the face of a pool of darkness five
And thirty dead years deep,
Antic in girlish broideries
And skirts and silly shoes with straps
And a broad-ribanded leghorn, he walks
Plain in the shadow of a church
(St. Michael's:  in whose brazen call
To curfew his first wails of wrath were whelmed),
Sedate for all his haste
To be at home; and, nestled in his arm,
Inciting still to quiet and solitude,
Boarded in sober drab,
With small, square, agitating cuts
Let in a-top of the double-columned, close,
Quakerlike print, a Book! . . .
What but that blessed brief
Of what is gallantest and best
In all the full-shelved Libraries of Romance?
The Book of rocs,
Sandalwood, ivory, turbans, ambergris,
Cream-tarts, and lettered apes, and calendars,
And ghouls, and genies--O, so huge
They might have overed the tall Minster Tower
Hands down, as schoolboys take a post!
In truth, the Book of Camaralzaman,
Schemselnihar and Sindbad, Scheherezade
The peerless, Bedreddin, Badroulbadour,
Cairo and Serendib and Candahar,
And Caspian, and the dim, terrific bulk--
Ice-ribbed, fiend-visited, isled in spells and storms--
Of Kaf! . . . That centre of miracles,
The sole, unparalleled Arabian Nights!

Old friends I had a-many--kindly and grim
Familiars, cronies quaint
And goblin!  Never a Wood but housed
Some morrice of dainty dapperlings.  No Brook
But had his nunnery
Of green-haired, silvry-curving sprites,
To cabin in his grots, and pace
His lilied margents.  Every lone Hillside
Might open upon Elf-Land.  Every Stalk
That curled about a Bean-stick was of the breed
Of that live ladder by whose delicate rungs
You climbed beyond the clouds, and found
The Farm-House where the Ogre, gorged
And drowsy, from his great oak chair,
Among the flitches and pewters at the fire,
Called for his Faery Harp.  And in it flew,
And, perching on the kitchen table, sang
Jocund and jubilant, with a sound
Of those gay, golden-vowered madrigals
The shy thrush at mid-May
Flutes from wet orchards flushed with the triumphing dawn;
Or blackbirds rioting as they listened still,
In old-world woodlands rapt with an old-world spring,
For Pan's own whistle, savage and rich and lewd,
And mocked him call for call!

I could not pass
The half-door where the cobbler sat in view
Nor figure me the wizen Leprechaun,
In square-cut, faded reds and buckle-shoes,
Bent at his work in the hedge-side, and know
Just how he tapped his brogue, and twitched
His wax-end this and that way, both with wrists
And elbows.  In the rich June fields,
Where the ripe clover drew the bees,
And the tall quakers trembled, and the West Wind
Lolled his half-holiday away
Beside me lolling and lounging through my own,
'Twas good to follow the Miller's Youngest Son
On his white horse along the leafy lanes;
For at his stirrup linked and ran,
Not cynical and trapesing, as he loped
From wall to wall above the espaliers,
But in the bravest tops
That market-town, a town of tops, could show:
Bold, subtle, adventurous, his tail
A banner flaunted in disdain
Of human stratagems and shifts:
King over All the Catlands, present and past
And future, that moustached
Artificer of fortunes, ****-in-Boots!
Or Bluebeard's Closet, with its plenishing
Of meat-hooks, sawdust, blood,
And wives that hung like fresh-dressed carcases--
Odd-fangled, most a butcher's, part
A faery chamber hazily seen
And hazily figured--on dark afternoons
And windy nights was visiting of the best.
Then, too, the pelt of hoofs
Out in the roaring darkness told
Of Herne the Hunter in his antlered helm
Galloping, as with despatches from the Pit,
Between his hell-born Hounds.
And Rip Van Winkle . . . often I lurked to hear,
Outside the long, low timbered, tarry wall,
The mutter and rumble of the trolling bowls
Down the lean plank, before they fluttered the pins;
For, listening, I could help him play
His wonderful game,
In those blue, booming hills, with Mariners
Refreshed from kegs not coopered in this our world.

But what were these so near,
So neighbourly fancies to the spell that brought
The run of Ali Baba's Cave
Just for the saying 'Open Sesame,'
With gold to measure, peck by peck,
In round, brown wooden stoups
You borrowed at the chandler's? . . . Or one time
Made you Aladdin's friend at school,
Free of his Garden of Jewels, Ring and Lamp
In perfect trim? . . . Or Ladies, fair
For all the embrowning scars in their white *******
Went labouring under some dread ordinance,
Which made them whip, and bitterly cry the while,
Strange Curs that cried as they,
Till there was never a Black ***** of all
Your consorting but might have gone
Spell-driven miserably for crimes
Done in the pride of womanhood and desire . . .
Or at the ghostliest altitudes of night,
While you lay wondering and acold,
Your sense was fearfully purged; and soon
Queen Labe, abominable and dear,
Rose from your side, opened the Box of Doom,
Scattered the yellow powder (which I saw
Like sulphur at the Docks in bulk),
And muttered certain words you could not hear;
And there! a living stream,
The brook you bathed in, with its weeds and flags
And cresses, glittered and sang
Out of the hearthrug over the nakedness,
Fair-scrubbed and decent, of your bedroom floor! . . .

I was--how many a time!--
That Second Calendar, Son of a King,
On whom 'twas vehemently enjoined,
Pausing at one mysterious door,
To pry no closer, but content his soul
With his kind Forty.  Yet I could not rest
For idleness and ungovernable Fate.
And the Black Horse, which fed on sesame
(That wonder-working word!),
Vouchsafed his back to me, and spread his vans,
And soaring, soaring on
From air to air, came charging to the ground
Sheer, like a lark from the midsummer clouds,
And, shaking me out of the saddle, where I sprawled
Flicked at me with his tail,
And left me blinded, miserable, distraught
(Even as I was in deed,
When doctors came, and odious things were done
On my poor tortured eyes
With lancets; or some evil acid stung
And wrung them like hot sand,
And desperately from room to room
Fumble I must my dark, disconsolate way),
To get to Bagdad how I might.  But there
I met with Merry Ladies.  O you three--
Safie, Amine, Zobeide--when my heart
Forgets you all shall be forgot!
And so we supped, we and the rest,
On wine and roasted lamb, rose-water, dates,
Almonds, pistachios, citrons.  And Haroun
Laughed out of his lordly beard
On Giaffar and Mesrour (I knew the Three
For all their Mossoul habits).  And outside
The Tigris, flowing swift
Like Severn bend for bend, twinkled and gleamed
With broken and wavering shapes of stranger stars;
The vast, blue night
Was murmurous with peris' plumes
And the leathern wings of genies; words of power
Were whispering; and old fishermen,
Casting their nets with prayer, might draw to shore
Dead loveliness:  or a prodigy in scales
Worth in the Caliph's Kitchen pieces of gold:
Or copper vessels, stopped with lead,
Wherein some Squire of Eblis watched and railed,
In durance under potent charactry
Graven by the seal of Solomon the King . . .

Then, as the Book was glassed
In Life as in some olden mirror's quaint,
Bewildering angles, so would Life
Flash light on light back on the Book; and both
Were changed.  Once in a house decayed
From better days, harbouring an errant show
(For all its stories of dry-rot
Were filled with gruesome visitants in wax,
Inhuman, hushed, ghastly with Painted Eyes),
I wandered; and no living soul
Was nearer than the pay-box; and I stared
Upon them staring--staring.  Till at last,
Three sets of rafters from the streets,
I strayed upon a mildewed, rat-run room,
With the two Dancers, horrible and obscene,
Guarding the door:  and there, in a bedroom-set,
Behind a fence of faded crimson cords,
With an aspect of frills
And dimities and dishonoured privacy
That made you hanker and hesitate to look,
A Woman with her litter of Babes--all slain,
All in their nightgowns, all with Painted Eyes
Staring--still staring; so that I turned and ran
As for my neck, but in the street
Took breath.  The same, it seemed,
And yet not all the same, I was to find,
As I went up!  For afterwards,
Whenas I went my round alone--
All day alone--in long, stern, silent streets,
Where I might stretch my hand and take
Whatever I would:  still there were Shapes of Stone,
Motionless, lifelike, frightening--for the Wrath
Had smitten them; but they watched,
This by her melons and figs, that by his rings
And chains and watches, with the hideous gaze,
The Painted Eyes insufferable,
Now, of those grisly images; and I
Pursued my best-beloved quest,
Thrilled with a novel and delicious fear.
So the night fell--with never a lamplighter;
And through the Palace of the King
I groped among the echoes, and I felt
That they were there,
Dreadfully there, the Painted staring Eyes,
Hall after hall . . . Till lo! from far
A Voice!  And in a little while
Two tapers burning!  And the Voice,
Heard in the wondrous Word of God, was--whose?
Whose but Zobeide's,
The lady of my heart, like me
A True Believer, and like me
An outcast thousands of leagues beyond the pale! . . .

Or, sailing to the Isles
Of Khaledan, I spied one evenfall
A black blotch in the sunset; and it grew
Swiftly . . . and grew.  Tearing their beards,
The sailors wept and prayed; but the grave ship,
Deep laden with spiceries and pearls, went mad,
Wrenched the long tiller out of the steersman's hand,
And, turning broadside on,
As the most iron would, was haled and ******
Nearer, and nearer yet;
And, all awash, with horrible lurching leaps
Rushed at that Portent, casting a shadow now
That swallowed sea and sky; and then,
Anchors and nails and bolts
Flew screaming out of her, and with clang on clang,
A noise of fifty stithies, caught at the sides
Of the Magnetic Mountain; and she lay,
A broken bundle of firewood, strown piecemeal
About the waters; and her crew
Passed shrieking, one by one; and I was left
To drown.  All the long night I swam;
But in the morning, O, the smiling coast
Tufted with date-trees, meadowlike,
Skirted with shelving sands!  And a great wave
Cast me ashore; and I was saved alive.
So, giving thanks to God, I dried my clothes,
And, faring inland, in a desert place
I stumbled on an iron ring--
The fellow of fifty built into the Quays:
When, scenting a trap-door,
I dug, and dug; until my biggest blade
Stuck into wood.  And then,
The flight of smooth-hewn, easy-falling stairs,
Sunk in the naked rock!  The cool, clean vault,
So neat with niche on niche it might have been
Our beer-cellar but for the rows
Of brazen urns (like monstrous chemist's jars)
Full to the wide, squat throats
With gold-dust, but a-top
A layer of pickled-walnut-looking things
I knew for olives!  And far, O, far away,
The Princess of China languished!  Far away
Was marriage, with a Vizier and a Chief
Of Eunuchs and the privilege
Of going out at night
To play--unkenned, majestical, secure--
Where the old, brown, friendly river shaped
Like Tigris shore for shore!  Haply a Ghoul
Sat in the churchyard under a frightened moon,
A thighbone in his fist, and glared
At supper with a Lady:  she who took
Her rice with tweezers grain by grain.
Or you might stumble--there by the iron gates
Of the Pump Room--underneath the limes--
Upon Bedreddin in his shirt and drawers,
Just as the civil Genie laid him down.
Or those red-curtained panes,
Whence a tame cornet tenored it throatily
Of beer-pots and spittoons and new long pipes,
Might turn a caravansery's, wherein
You found Noureddin Ali, loftily drunk,
And that fair Persian, bathed in tears,
You'd not have given away
For all the diamonds in the Vale Perilous
You had that dark and disleaved afternoon
Escaped on a roc's claw,
Disguised like Sindbad--but in Christmas beef!
And all the blissful while
The schoolboy satchel at your hip
Was such a bulse of gems as should amaze
Grey-whiskered chapmen drawn
From over Caspian:  yea, the Chief Jewellers
Of Tartary and the bazaars,
Seething with traffic, of enormous Ind.--

Thus cried, thus called aloud, to the child heart
The magian East:  thus the child eyes
Spelled out the wizard message by the light
Of the sober, workaday hours
They saw, week in week out, pass, and still pass
In the sleepy Minster City, folded kind
In ancient Severn's arm,
Amongst her water-meadows and her docks,
Whose floating populace of ships--
Galliots and luggers, light-heeled brigantines,
Bluff barques and rake-hell fore-and-afters--brought
To her very doorsteps and geraniums
The scents of the World's End; the calls
That may not be gainsaid to rise and ride
Like fire on some high errand of the race;
The irresistible appeals
For comradeship that sound
Steadily from the irresistible sea.
Thus the East laughed and whispered, and the tale,
Telling itself anew
In terms of living, labouring life,
Took on the colours, busked it in the wear
Of life that lived and laboured; and Romance,
The Angel-Playmate, raining down
His golden influences
On all I saw, and all I dreamed and did,
Walked with me arm in arm,
Or left me, as one bediademed with straws
And bits of glass, to gladden at my heart
Who had the gift to seek and feel and find
His fiery-hearted presence everywhere.
Even so dear Hesper, bringer of all good things,
Sends the same silver dews
Of happiness down her dim, delighted skies
On some poor collier-hamlet--(mound on mound
Of sifted squalor; here a soot-throated stalk
Sullenly smoking over a row
Of flat-faced hovels; black in the gritty air
A web of rails and wheels and beams; with strings
Of hurtling, tipping trams)--
As on the amorous nightingales
And roses of Shiraz, or the walls and towers
Of Samarcand--the Ineffable--whence you espy
The splendour of Ginnistan's embattled spears,
Like listed lightnings.
Samarcand!
That name of names!  That star-vaned belvedere
Builded against the Chambers of the South!
That outpost on the Infinite!
And behold!
Questing therefrom, you knew not what wild tide
Might overtake you:  for one fringe,
One suburb, is stablished on firm earth; but one
Floats founded vague
In lubberlands delectable--isles of palm
And lotus, fortunate mains, far-shimmering seas,
The promise of wistful hills--
The shining, shifting Sovranties of Dream.

The child alone a poet is:
Spring and Fairyland are his.
Truth and Reason show but dim,
And all’s poetry with him.
Rhyme and music flow in plenty
For the lad of one-and-twenty,
But Spring for him is no more now
Than daisies to a munching cow;
Just a cheery pleasant season,
Daisy buds to live at ease on.
He’s forgotten how he smiled
And shrieked at snowdrops when a child,
Or wept one evening secretly
For April’s glorious misery.
Wisdom made him old and wary
Banishing the Lords of Faery.
Wisdom made a breach and battered
Babylon to bits: she scattered
To the hedges and ditches
All our nursery gnomes and witches.
Lob and Puck, poor frantic elves,
Drag their treasures from the shelves.
Jack the Giant-killer’s gone,
Mother Goose and Oberon,
Bluebeard and King Solomon.
Robin, and Red Riding Hood
Take together to the wood,
And Sir Galahad lies hid
In a cave with Captain Kidd.
None of all the magic hosts,
None remain but a few ghosts
Of timorous heart, to linger on
Weeping for lost Babylon.

Husband to wife on way out did say:
"There is plenty of space in my house to stay.
Feel free to go around wherever my dear,
Except for one room, which is banned for you here.

Death is the price, set for breaking my law,
- Don't go downstairs to that room on first floor,
Though I shall leave upon you all the keys ...
Stay out from entering it, be obedient, please!"

Just when he left, she went down at once,
While devil whispers: "Don't miss the chance!"
Here's that coveted key to the door ...
"Open it up" - devil says: "wait no more!" ...

I am a sinner,
A sinner who dared dreamt of love,
A sinner whose only sin was to be hideous,
A sinner who did not know it was a sin,
A sin to not be perfect as the world wants.

A beast who never got the beauty,
A dwarf in love with the sleeping beauty,
A frog who did not turn into a prince when kissed,
A Bluebeard without the forbidden room,
A beast who was never a cursed prince, never blissed.

So I tear away pieces of myself to be perfect,
To be someone, not bound by their looks—
The polite boy, the helpful friend, the good guy,
The martyr, the forgotten, the soldier of a hopeless war.
Only to be reminded I’ll always be the loveless one.

Beauty and the Beast, sounds so lovely, doesn’t it?
But I never wanted to be the beast.
It never sounded hopeful or enchanting in my abyss.
All I could hear was pity and sympathy,
Mixed with my demeaning and desperate pleas.

Is love such a luxury,
That one needs to be perfect to reach it?
Or is it just the case for me?
I see everywhere people have it and are happy—
Why are they nowhere close to the ideals burdened upon me?

So I weep and weep without cries and shouts
I weep for one to love me and only me unconditionally
To drown in me as I would for them—
To love me as deeply as I love,
But no one ever does.

plant a tree too close to others
its growth is stifled, development smothered,
it'll wax scrawny, tall and lank,
needing its neighbours to cling to the bank

its roots cannot spread,
its branches are muted,
without anchor or head
smallest gale can uproot it

plant a tree without support
it'll grow awkward, twisted and gaunt,
plant a tree without protection,
it'll be trampled or plagued by infection

but plant a tree with space all round
with support and guidance, staked to the ground,
it''ll grow proud with full formation,
a shelter for humans and bird habitation

tie a horse to cart or hearse
without bit or bridle, reins or headpiece
it''ll run amok, out of control,
subject to whim, race, gallop or stroll.

tie a horse too tight to carriage,
whip with crop without fear of carnage,
it'll suffocate, unable to breathe,
or bristle and flare, simmer and seethe.

but tie with care, treat with sensitivity
it'll reward you with years of activity
it'll enjoy its ride with you
a friend 'n ally till its adieu

smother a child with rules and restrictions
it'll develop maladies and evil addictions,
or else be forever unable to speak,
individuality suppressed, character weak.

treat it with abandon and over-laxity,
it'll never understand the meaning of chastity,
capricious and fickle, as ship without rudder,
there'll be crime 'n disgrace to make Bluebeard shudder

cram the child into class of peers,
without room to breathe, develop in years,
it''ll mature narrow, petty and limited,
easily broken or slanted 'n bigoted.

but guide it with love, with room to develop,
surround it with friends but not to envelop,
show it firmness while broadening horizons
a free spirit with integrity 'twill be till it wizens

Fathoms below
Diving slow
Buried treasure to see
Searching for me
Captain Bluebeard had treasure on the ship
A mighty storm caused the ship to dip
Suddenly the ship went down
It was nowhere to be found
Total capsize
Sank to the bottom
Throughout the ocean, there are sharks and all kinds of fish
On my mind was the treasure find being my wish
Through Davey’s Locker
The flashlight being our marker
Ocean floor
Explore
Gold and Silver
Determined in maneuver
Becoming rich
Value and Quality
It’s all about Quantity
Mystery being reality
Ocean deep
Yea ship mates
Fortune to keep
Ever so deep

moon in l
moon in m
moon in mmm
moon in shhh, blue "shhh", blue stars
"innn" in "pain"
"i" in both
"t" in the end of "pain", like when you do the same spit and speed with "sweet".
with "piano" at the end of scorpion.
with "no" of piano sting.
please do "sui" with "sweet". sweetest.
"dictionary - pain" that spreaded on the wall. on walls.
to know pain or to feel?
snakes turning "pain" into "passion".
you need two snakes, in center. taking away "I" from sound.
I'm in st#bborn immersion in mercy, like snakes.
I will find it in mercy or pain?
image, pain. not the image.

black moon and grey moon
little black moon is hook
with handle in a shape of cross like ink-cross on neck.
little black moon ingrained in moon, in empty focus, in identical yours, double manifested, double sticking. in velvet glue, in well wet, in black honey, like cancer. of everything. like can'tcer. of everything. and it's happening in my hands. i have little egyptian bed in psychology of my hands.
most far moon point, her sickle sticking in ****** with one of two ejected disembodied nodes, with weeks-corridors.
they're glued like when day of first *** and day of ******* get glued. their substance cataractize the direction of catharsis.

moan innn ec-lips
between twins tonguess
in sick-red kiss, in sacred ****-red
in drying «yes»
but say not only «yes», but «you» too.
somewhere between yes and you i want to find a word.
fingerlips, lipsnails, leuco-sapphires.
loudmother?
and stick to big skissors. don't live without them.
stick fingers into skull on knees, wash the nameless bones. their voices, they whisper back.
"you are more than this", they hiss. i know they lie — i am only this, only ever this.
I want kissing more than you and you.
no feed, no feet, no free. no water, only fat. no curing, no schools, no studies, go into night like in school, only mouth, only lying
between wars and swords in words, like book that like legs splitting almost equally somewhere between "alice" and "******", "******" and "dracula". between witches and enlightenment, and light of ten men.
talk with words by next word.
ask words of that thing that they're know.
want thank you for each touch of keys.
said one word on the floor, and never stop.
swallow thin short golden chain one by one, from skirt that close to floor, swallow their shhh.
kiss empty fast circle
kiss ardra, kiss bhar, kiss rev
kiss wish, wishash
kiss cats with long crooked necks, a cat that licked raven's head.
stroke between cat's eyes with one finger.
not lips, not much.
is it better to be unkissed or to wander through the streets?
am I ardra, or not? with that through my teeth? am i written "die" or not?
cards thinned like skin, too long in the sun, old cards on belly, tarot on the white long like dress table between fish bones, tarot *****, t-angelo t-anger, and jade walls under my back - that's all I want.
and inner became double.
and three parts.
and the blood on rice on the street-soaked-butcher shop, and hands on it. each grain, each drop.
I don't want to forget the fish bones, boneless rice-worms. street with cauldrons, screams, progression of forms of black birds and animals with suddenly crystal blue membranes and thin-walled clean ***** rolling out of them. with stairs right there. bare ***** smart feet, roll over crossbar and laugh.
please let everything roll over the rocks.
the stones, the bags with ropes, the metal objects.
let the bags with ropes drag themselves into shadows.
please, a burning carriage.
please, fights by the falling waters.
please, horse's eye.
please, no obsession with wholeness.
at the same time I want the only place where I can read the letter to be the tall heated statues, on sun square with chapel, like clocks.
i trace letters with fingertips, burning myself and letter with each word, but it's all will be at statue's feet.
but if "read" could be always tied to "feet", the rest of life is doesn't matter.
and i need Bluebeard with a husband in a wife's room.
all wives are starting to stirring.
I want you like a tree.
I want you like a three.
and i want to lay on the drums. to love creatures without hands.
with what these creatures love? with teeth? with bones? with two cоcks?
I saw the drum that never harsh.
I want drums arranged in lines by mind, under skies with weight of water, I want fcking in every drop of rain that hum like these words with "hum". written in crystal and chitin. i don't wanna room in every teardrop. I don't wanna universe with tree in every drop.
I want drum, I want murd, drum on knees, drum with white fibers, drum as salivary *****, piano like drum, moon shhh and croaks through screen glass into screaming eyes and in body like in alive theater every night. skin-venereal films, nevereal. groove of magnets, loops of sticklips and little, like teeth, pieces. antithesis in backing vocal.
I want the green man and the jade man.
want movie where Hermes in dirt, in mess, want sister of twins, little black m*ss.
I miss you and only a kiss in the many years ago dead cancerous brain of horror movie director calms me down.
the cancerous brain whispers back, "kiss me again".
snakes: do you wanna let them crawling on your body or lying on them?
do you want them crawling or lying?
insomniacs singing scales between us that hum with hymns to the alphabet that tasted and unspoken.
flickered out by flickered tongues.
tongues that are used for smells.
i just want you to swallow all of my secrets, i want that sharing and that buring.
my sense of life is like a secret that has been splash out into the cooling cosmic void. this secret really like secretion, and it flickers and splits there, in the. like Emily. that was Isabelle. when she went to her room...not her room, it's hystorical hysterical slip. but in a separate room with door. It's not hysteria, it's tuberculosis historically, literally, from literature.
hundreds of snakes: were burned.
hundreds of snakes: wife that wants give and give birth to snakes.
give birth hundreds of snakes or two sons?
you ask, and ardra would commend. and would she kiss the ash? would she approve your kiss between worlds unspoken?
«crawl on me», she says, like sister of twins, or maybe, «lie beneath me».

after the skin comes world, not lips, lips comes after world.
cat is vanishes.
whole day on knees.
i lie down in glue velvet. i want touch first with hair or knees? fire unites them.
i spill things from box in the center of room into the glue.
i smear a glue across forehead.
inscription glued or blurred?
it is word "air", because I'm in helmet and I'm flying.
with other ******* my back.
although I'm standing by the dishwasher.
she's the one who flies.
or maybe just today even she's can't and lying instead rehearsals
and watching two girls fly
a children in burgundy
and I come in a circus hammock with ropes and red and aquamarine blankets, huge as ships, with yellow-orange pillows with bright blue tassels and then once his blue eye.
I cover her from above
under the children's hands.
somewhere between bells and chitin,
i lie down in glue
binding skin to different ways to write the word «moment».
I want to hold the moon with all hands here, in this degree, in the place of my tongue,
hold her like ouija tablet, but she's too alive like an animal and continues to rotate,
and I am a dead alphabet, and for every letter every night every month 100 units are pulled out of me, pinched, forced to come up with 100 words and letters for each letter, then choose only words for inanimated objects.
i lie down, i don't wanna write that moon watching me above.
where i belong – in the cut. and scream. pia no. films that sawing the light. just a movies. and almost slaving labour. and my love.
I lie down and just wait for my language to crystallize, and i find a rain in the molasses.
but I want to always hold onto "the moon in mmm", I want "innn" and "lclean" in dictionary.
and I have to bury a cat in the snows, just catch her from the fridge

I crushed my cigarette into the
safety of flat, white ashes, watching
the smoke tread up among
clouds creased into these
craven shapes that
gingerly fade and
escape the sky—and
muscled up out of the
white-knuckled, cloud-muzzled,
muttering sunrise, some
quaint cut of an epitaph’s
cousin:

Mold grown over the
mold again—note

What blistering gifts
entrained in a thumb-
print, callused from
picking at so many
bolts, stripped

all of it soft as the
shirts that my grandmother’d
offered me, dregs of a dew-damp
aside, those
delicate flannels
my grandfather no longer
fit in—as well as a pair of white
oversized socks that had haughtily
disregarded the fact that my foot was
larger than what strange sole he squeezed
in a work boot.

                              —

My grandfather’d kept a bramble of anvils
thumbtacked together to shoulder a shed.

Each house he’d had, four
mortgages coldly afforded from
whispering proverbs to pistons, wearing
incomparable thumbprints down into
black-iron casts of milk glass-smooth tonsures
from loosening lockjawed bolts and Heineken caps,
from sussing the sweat and the schmutz
from an engine; had
   each a similar shed,
you’d dare not mention
aloud for fear of it filling with
dybbuks reduced to
woodgrain gusseting
ribs of young Bluebeard’s
           bloated potato barn—once,

he ushered me over to witness
the door uncurl from its verdigrised hinges, and
                 rolled out a rusted patio table like
          Sisyphus taking a day at the races. He

always wore these paper-frail v-neck tees
and jeans to cover his crepe-paper body. He,
well into his sixties, still could calmly suspend himself
straight from a t-***** fence post, perfectly
level with earth, even given its
gaily lazing curve, yes, perfectly

parallel. Parallel meaning that he and the

earth should never meet, for a moment, the
two of them **** near perfectly twain, except
for the stock stiff fencepost spelling out mercy
or mercy me, maybe, too deep in the flickering
woodgrain, really, for anyone willing to see it—

He gave me the patio table to salve and
sell as a vessel of oenomel vintage. He’d

never quite found the time to refurbish it. There-
by the anvils staked their claim, and I asked,

amid a frank flurry of each of his
four hunched children scribbling
names on an **** of moldering heirlooms,

"What’s with all the anvils, Papaw?"
"You can’t have my anvils," he mercifully
muttered. "No, really," I spluttered, "why

all the anvils"—now, this old
man that my father (his former
son-in-law) commonly
muttered of, clambering
praise, your grandfather works
              like an animal; this small
                                          man, whose
                                          legs, reflecting
                                          a maglite, just
                                          might elbow a
                                          hole in the Hoover
                                Dam, this man, who
spent every cheeseparing hour
immersed in a moat of work
with a snorkel of maybe
two Heinekens nightly, told me,
colder than stars collapse, "I wanted

to take up blacksmithing—albeit
I’d yet to find the time for it."

                                  It recalled
my father’s father once confiding
in me (a seduction, really, that led
to him asking me, telling me, "You," yes,
"you should chronicle [what was] my life"),

that Arlene, my father’s mother (replaced
by Darlene, some years later) had wanted for years
to be but a dressmaker—that, evermore tacitly
tragic still, that he, whose life had demanded
a chronicle, went to "my local baker and said,

you should train me. The Baker said, 'no.
You wouldn’t much like it.' I asked him again,"
and we’ll leave it at that. He’s retired and

twice now, once
as a cop and once
as a, what’s the politest way to say it, a
corrections officer, a
                                          prison guard, left

whittling down his
ribs and knees with
a sharpened spoon he’d
honed upon how many
broken bowls of spaghetti-
ing dreams drawn up in a listless
bone-braced cyst. At twenty,
he’d sired two children already.

A tidldibab is, of course, an invented name
for a bone with a hole in it somebody took
for an heirloom instrument, one that be-
queathed the urge to make music out
of, well, just about anything really—

That was the mold
grown over with
mold again: note

what blistering gifts
entrained in a thumb-
print, callused from
picking at so many
bolts, stripped.