Rest
Softer than foam
when the heights are pounding into the body-stream,
adding resistance to what cannot stop trembling.
I make a mould of your footprints,
hang them over the washing machine.
I climb the scaffolding
fearless of my natural fears -
lifting mortar into a pale, bricklaying and laying out bricks
to seal a song, ready then
to pull out of the quicksand and feed you
in your darkness.
Pooling flies
in the jungle of your fragmented emotions.
What you cut off will never grow on its own
until you splice a branch of your bones and bind it fresh
in a ritual of rejoining.
You were born devouring splinters. I cannot change you,
but I can rest my hands on your shoulders, help you
to trust the feeling of family. I can stay,
give you a fork to eat with, make it soft,
and that soft will intoxicate, thread a cushioned contoured protection.
It will stretch around you, satiate
with womb-like warmth.
The laws that find me bind me
heavy and wasted
as in the first weeks of lost love,
as if the lifting song of summer sank in the bog
of my many crippled attempts at salvation.
Loose skin around the cheekbones.
Fissures repeat kaleidoscope visions.
Snake bites on my ankles like
the opaque rules of tedious afternoons, trying
to cut clean into a full separation the already divided wind.
Exhibitions and energy not worth keeping.
Anger resolves with an ethereal kill,
making and placing food on the table to limit the direction
of desire. Desire to stalk a pale flame
and grow a core of heat, but instead
snipped and clipped at the meridian centre,
pitted against love at its softest point. Love
at its most isolating point,
flayed across a concrete pyramid, inside
a Minotaur-maze of forgotten escape routes.
Dealt and received, a stack of conditions
that can never be lifted or walked away from.
I will speak because
the explosive veined-sun dominates our Earth’s universe,
and bloody barren corpses infiltrate the ground,
calling upon mealworm dialogue - calling for useless conversation,
eating makebelief applecore practicalities and gossip seeds
like ‘Bobok’’s people in various degrees of decomposition.
Let me live on the rooftops, away from the ghosts
puffing up their tuffs with spintop epilogues of I, I, I, and God
in all four pockets – enslaved, once-beautiful divinity,
to sloppy-string opinions and ritualized overload.
Great stained-glass eyes of the one eye, where are you?
Only the sound of a shallow drumbeat drumming,
plunging me into this sewer-tunnel template, dangerous
as the planet we are all forced to manoeuver on.
Save me from cherished traditions and filing-cabinet dreams.
Save me from my bodily needs. Transform me into an angel or into
the one transformed from the angel - never to come here again,
except to hold my only true love
and to cradle close the heads of my sleeping children.
Body of water
Death is a stream I must undress
to enter to know its cool wetness in every
crease of my flesh, merging with me like an
expanse of skin. I’ve been waiting, moaning
at the dilemma of existing – ecstasy and nights
of bedding sleeplessness like a lover I cannot release.
You love me in the cave, in the lightless kingdom
of your melancholy and your rage. Lift me now from
this drowning. I feel sick as though all my air is gone. There
is so much weight inside of me – the choking, the squeezing out
of my mortality. I cannot stop. My head aches like a locked room
on fire – chlorophyll all around and mid-day is a serpent
emerging from between my toes. You let me burn the incense.
I burned it, and I cannot breathe now without those
scents to wade in and sooth my despair.
Doubt
Afterwards, I sit on the altar
of my withdrawal. I will not kneel, rendering
myself a thicker chair. My kind, like
fangs and hooves combined in one secret
creature. A city without history, emotions that
echo but do not deliver. My dress of skin: this place
cannot hold me any longer. Do you see the thumbprint
of the ocean – crater like – in the center of every Earth-rhythm?
Unable to fully believe in Earthy-things and the sun in its
frame of sky, marching on and over – so tired of this
tangle! ongoing. going on. For hopes of a caress, an instant
of locked eyes and the merging of souls. My voice -
weightless as a dream. Desire is a shell, the scent of
cedarwood saturating the pores, memories I haven’t
yet encountered. Sweeping is the goal. And love stays, but how much
is a basket of exotic fruit, and how much more,
imagination?
Tell me
Tell me what
is this aberration, this final cut-glass
apparatus? What are you holding me for,
on this earthquaked-ground with madness filling
my ears, with no relief from the quickening, no shortcut
to liberation? What whim am I? Eventual.
I am eventual, grounded only by my children and the
animals that pace my floors. I will do a visible
decisive deed if that is what you want or I will
suck in the deadening-pretend, barbaric in its stupidity,
disingenuous in its over-rated kindness. What is left?
Tell me, deprive me of government, of natural things
that others have, but tell me what you want me ready
for. Hire me with this particular fruit. Let me be noble,
eliminate my doubt, my fear of being wrong or cruel. Take me
into your music, pound my spirit with your weight and
effort. Tell me what rabid ghost I must put down.
Help me
put it down.
Softer than foam
when the heights are pounding into the body-stream,
adding resistance to what cannot stop trembling.
I make a mould of your footprints,
hang them over the washing machine.
I climb the scaffolding
fearless of my natural fears -
lifting mortar into a pale, bricklaying and laying out bricks
to seal a song, ready then
to pull out of the quicksand and feed you
in your darkness.
Pooling flies
in the jungle of your fragmented emotions.
What you cut off will never grow on its own
until you splice a branch of your bones and bind it fresh
in a ritual of rejoining.
You were born devouring splinters. I cannot change you,
but I can rest my hands on your shoulders, help you
to trust the feeling of family. I can stay,
give you a fork to eat with, make it soft,
and that soft will intoxicate, thread a cushioned contoured protection.
It will stretch around you, satiate
with womb-like warmth.
The laws that find me bind me
heavy and wasted
as in the first weeks of lost love,
as if the lifting song of summer sank in the bog
of my many crippled attempts at salvation.
Loose skin around the cheekbones.
Fissures repeat kaleidoscope visions.
Snake bites on my ankles like
the opaque rules of tedious afternoons, trying
to cut clean into a full separation the already divided wind.
Exhibitions and energy not worth keeping.
Anger resolves with an ethereal kill,
making and placing food on the table to limit the direction
of desire. Desire to stalk a pale flame
and grow a core of heat, but instead
snipped and clipped at the meridian centre,
pitted against love at its softest point. Love
at its most isolating point,
flayed across a concrete pyramid, inside
a Minotaur-maze of forgotten escape routes.
Dealt and received, a stack of conditions
that can never be lifted or walked away from.
I will speak because
the explosive veined-sun dominates our Earth’s universe,
and bloody barren corpses infiltrate the ground,
calling upon mealworm dialogue - calling for useless conversation,
eating makebelief applecore practicalities and gossip seeds
like ‘Bobok’’s people in various degrees of decomposition.
Let me live on the rooftops, away from the ghosts
puffing up their tuffs with spintop epilogues of I, I, I, and God
in all four pockets – enslaved, once-beautiful divinity,
to sloppy-string opinions and ritualized overload.
Great stained-glass eyes of the one eye, where are you?
Only the sound of a shallow drumbeat drumming,
plunging me into this sewer-tunnel template, dangerous
as the planet we are all forced to manoeuver on.
Save me from cherished traditions and filing-cabinet dreams.
Save me from my bodily needs. Transform me into an angel or into
the one transformed from the angel - never to come here again,
except to hold my only true love
and to cradle close the heads of my sleeping children.
Body of water
Death is a stream I must undress
to enter to know its cool wetness in every
crease of my flesh, merging with me like an
expanse of skin. I’ve been waiting, moaning
at the dilemma of existing – ecstasy and nights
of bedding sleeplessness like a lover I cannot release.
You love me in the cave, in the lightless kingdom
of your melancholy and your rage. Lift me now from
this drowning. I feel sick as though all my air is gone. There
is so much weight inside of me – the choking, the squeezing out
of my mortality. I cannot stop. My head aches like a locked room
on fire – chlorophyll all around and mid-day is a serpent
emerging from between my toes. You let me burn the incense.
I burned it, and I cannot breathe now without those
scents to wade in and sooth my despair.
Doubt
Afterwards, I sit on the altar
of my withdrawal. I will not kneel, rendering
myself a thicker chair. My kind, like
fangs and hooves combined in one secret
creature. A city without history, emotions that
echo but do not deliver. My dress of skin: this place
cannot hold me any longer. Do you see the thumbprint
of the ocean – crater like – in the center of every Earth-rhythm?
Unable to fully believe in Earthy-things and the sun in its
frame of sky, marching on and over – so tired of this
tangle! ongoing. going on. For hopes of a caress, an instant
of locked eyes and the merging of souls. My voice -
weightless as a dream. Desire is a shell, the scent of
cedarwood saturating the pores, memories I haven’t
yet encountered. Sweeping is the goal. And love stays, but how much
is a basket of exotic fruit, and how much more,
imagination?
Tell me
Tell me what
is this aberration, this final cut-glass
apparatus? What are you holding me for,
on this earthquaked-ground with madness filling
my ears, with no relief from the quickening, no shortcut
to liberation? What whim am I? Eventual.
I am eventual, grounded only by my children and the
animals that pace my floors. I will do a visible
decisive deed if that is what you want or I will
suck in the deadening-pretend, barbaric in its stupidity,
disingenuous in its over-rated kindness. What is left?
Tell me, deprive me of government, of natural things
that others have, but tell me what you want me ready
for. Hire me with this particular fruit. Let me be noble,
eliminate my doubt, my fear of being wrong or cruel. Take me
into your music, pound my spirit with your weight and
effort. Tell me what rabid ghost I must put down.
Help me
put it down.