skin of my teeth
If I could be ravished by the beauty of pen on paper
ink on holocaust sand
black on red
the iris in the back of my palm.
Blocks of grey charcoal moon would open their feet where the lilacs grew
Seeping blue the turbid whole
Eating soggy lips of an eclipsed lune
Tear-stained fingernails cut in two.
Another one died, another grew.
Violent grace atop a dish cloth
Gelled protoplasmic projections dipped in glue
Broken death-games
knees of ampersand the colon clogged in exclamatory land .
Vaginal muck, in a quagmire of forgotten hopes
The things they said that never wore
Not through the torrents of pistualted life
Not through the annals of cesspooled knives
Neither through the crystal beads of tender hands
Nor through the tentative moves I made on your command.
The floating words of an anchored no-man’s land
their helium syllables they stew in my qualmI inhale the smell it permeates inside
I breathe the solid it passes out as ice
melting and oozing and spreading deeper still
it pours out of an abyss of rusted goals
into the river of Mary’s blood
into the sword of Deucalion’s flood
The house of roses was built with snow
it’s summertime it must go
Down the quarries
Down the rivulets
The convulsing oesophagus
it often forgets
