Bugs bitten skin deep soul
[I slept on lot of empty plastic bottles]
Salted eyeballs, a chopstick
Two, they always asked for two
[Stamped]
White chalks, bitter coughs
Childhood! Roses and a caterpillar
I had taught myself not to cry
Grown like gecko, became huge as *** of fears
Empty cocoon
Music box, grandmother, her smile and mole
[Nice pass, basketball]
Please turn off the lights and lock the window
[Too fat, though]
I wondered what more I could ask for
How perfect, monochrome
I was born, the world
[Moths are beautiful too]
Hey hey oily feathers
Butterflies cannot fly too high after all
It was never battle scars the ocean loved
[Eyeballs, remember eyeballs]
Forked
Babies and the steps
Climb your stairs, lungless
[Eyes were the most burned]
Chest, o Christmas tree and wedding cake
Claps, stories of mockery
Photographs, memories, what stays and fades
[The bridge saw you and fell in love--
I was crossing it
I was crossing it]

Where is the grass
once braid of field?
The empty stream -
a nonchantant dream.
The rub of eye's,
a steep descent -
into the brambles,
glaring along dumped concrete bags
bleached in this lungless place.

Have voice from between silence and authority,
so that reassuring quick compulsions as you destroy
and attack can last. None of the silent and empty men,
or boys, believe in living memory, only
in the evening dusk and foggy morning.
I thought about everyone else, kept away,
in my cold considering of the sun and night and helpless
sound. Away but in an awful time, back in circles,
lost as ever and wandering in a helpless way.
There was a stranger by the grass and I could see
his eyes, quick and cold and hard. I was seeing my senses -
sight, smell - and a faintness seemed to topple away
and leave me alone, where there were no strangling men
or *****, far-away wildernesses. Foul and torn, a cruel
face with no eyes hit the bone and screamed a breathless,
lungless scream, as though the whole place had stood up,
******, and left. I should have died.
Noise was coming from hard men's voices, white burning
and white flesh, when they saw and called out to them.
Rasping on the thorns, I understood that the boy,
and everything else, was like an acorn falling
from the oak tree. The man left and I went slowly
rolling into the choice I was choking on.

A room of many doors.
This is not what I meant.

Doe white walls, half lit from what light?

The sensation of option leaves quickly
as the rain that never comes.

How long am I to stagger along these walls
curseless as a ghost, feeble handed

and trailing fingers

claspless along every groove and *****
of brass, of wood, of parchment?

How to wind circles in a square?

What flat universe has swallowed me
only to reconfigure the obvious parts?

I feel that something stares through me
dull as a hammer

and I melt like glass
lungless and ugly,
watching the dead pile outside the windows

-so much condensation for so much blue.