House plants are hostages
we take while we rob  
the bank of life for
all the experience notes we
can carry safely away.

We are using the funds
to build our vivarium
homes, microcosms of
the world beyond our walls
where we first glimpsed
the scheme.

The machinery of the world,
greased by blood and sweat,
remains beyond our control
while at large, yet
under our close supervision
we coax submission
out of our captives for
our own enjoyment:

selfish, ambivalently cruel
benefactors, dispensers of
our plants' waters of life.

my chest has become the home of a one-eyed boa.

when I was a child, this serpent was a child,

but now my vivarium has become exceedingly small

for this great snake as it grows and stretches my skin.

I am not elastic.

and as the mid drift coils around my black cavity chest,

part slithers up my throat,

causing me to gargle and choke,

silencing me into silence,

while the remaining 1/3 slides through

a short tube to my stomach.

I am nauseous.

this is the feeling when your boy

is playing soccer

and it’s all you can do to not think of

how he smells like grass and sweat and soccer

and how you would love to wrap your fingers around him.

and for a severed second

I am waiting for nachos.

and for a severed second I thought I was a warm, golden tortilla chip

that someone would want to crunch in their mouth.

This is the feeling when he gives another girl his jacket

and walks her to her car

and she compliments his eyes

and calls him by the nicknames you thought

were yours.

and for a severed second you think

of all the reasons you know you are inadequate.

like brown eyes withholding the freckles

and like the fact that you can’t command

your own skin or the way that it tears.

I am not stuck in a rut.

I am the grand canyon,

stuck in myself

without any water to drown myself in.

I am not made of acne,

I am a pimple.

and i’m every pimple

on all the faces

of my lovers who gave up trying or let me sink quietly

into the background as

doe-like females sauntered into the fore-

I am not a spot

I am a speckle that rides on the backs of spindly spiders

I am orange. I am poison.

I am not the geese but the pond.

*****, overgrown and stagnant.

she is his rock and his river

and I though he was mine.

white surfaces flash in fluorescent lighting –

this is no opus, heaving on cold bathroom tiles,

blood and grain against porcelain,

convulsing creature in all its grotesque obloquy:

bleary and snotting. four-walled, windowless, antiseptic vivarium;

life crawls outside. it thrives, it devours, it fortifies.

inside, here, it repulses. ****** effluvium of all kinds.

sharp shrieks of skin across glossed floor, tears soak

before the cliff of the jaw. nothing stays.

wiping drool off the sterile sink and sweat off my knotted back.

snarls choking into sobs, sobs gasping for air.

this is no opus; blackening from corners,

the repugnant vignette held between fingernails –

for the contagious odium of the resigned abhorrent

bleeds and drips and stains.

neglect and rejection strewn like pearls,

pearls, worth nothing, feeling everything.

a fly buzzes in the stark fluorescent light,

and blackness climbs in. blackness consumes.

basemented   this liminal vivarium of cool moulded plastic
             with mirrors standing in for windows
and a ring of branded restaurants taking refuge at the edges
    all familiar     no surprises
the staff set up
         for the consumers morning
                      of slack mastication
      (Local chain, national, international)
  
the old-timers   glomming into clump
    benign zombies
an arrangement of fellas with dissolving jaws
  cudding over mammary notions
       untailored in sacky pallid sultana skins
    reform in a mumble
doing snailish pinball movements
            crossing and recrossing floors
         cleanly tiled for biohazard accidents
               salivating about the savoury soft foods to come

the restaurants rattle-shake-raise their security blinds

also noted
a mixed bag of people projecting
      into their smooth glowing slablets
    making out like worldly fools

also present
cropped and groomed toy security
      peering between the fronds of plastic foliage

offscreen
public bathrooms   the first struggling **** of the day

also present
a bench of  youngsters in bright blue screen matching pjs
  the four employees of sanitation
      drumming up for the shift

see also
vague happy lady in a  garish sarong
importing her holiday religion

The volume **** in your car is broken
but I think you like it that way.
You have your own dial on the wheel so hat
Only you control the severity of your environment,
Being on your own terms.
So I float here, in your vivarium
It'd be best to breathe your air
and bleed your blood
like my own.
Anglerfish love,
If only the fates were reversed
For I love you and also long to be you
How free to be you,
I ensure.
But could I love myself so dearly,
Embody my mother so clearly,
if my soul was not set
in its role-finding ways?
If I could not claim to be as I am,
Healer of the World for the Fascinating.
Oh, you,
my love.
My all-at-once art,
could you adore my vast emptiness
of who I could have been
if not dedicated to this practice of romance in earnest?