Winter is a hangover and I am its wretch. I drank months too many bottles of sunshine. Look at me now. Wind sweeps ache straight through empty flesh to bone. Desperate fatigue: I can’t form a thought or accomplish a thing and I can’t see why I should because I can’t see the light. Just gray, gray, gray and it goes day, day, day. My brain’s all fogged like the shit I can’t defrost off my windshield, and these days I can’t see at all.
I fail to listen
to every note given
sounding winter’s drink
Press spikes through my palms, slow. Jam your thumbnails through my eyelids so they tear like paper and scoop the gelatin out of the cavity. Grind my skull in your palms to a fine dust and let the wind carry it. Drill through my gums so that my molars and the like tumble loose out of my mouth. Fashion them into a saw with which to begin a preliminary incision: left upper torso. Wrench my heart out skewered upon your middle finger. And leave my tongue for last so that I can say ‘thank you, have a nice day.’
Should death do us part I would rob her of that pitch cloak and bathe it in your sunfire. I would let the illumination of your irises in hers sever all forces of destruction: the moment of radical recognition. Should death do us part I would shatter her kneecaps and blacken her eye as a man does. I would retrace every worldly act, every atrocity, to clutch you just once again — tight to the breast. Should death do us part I would interrogate her like the tribunal did Socrates, and hope she had a better reason for forcing the hemlock chalice to our lips than that ‘it could be good’. Elsewise unconvinced I would ravage the gates of heaven and hell and I would let them taste our earthly delights in divine carnage. I would see them bleed and I would see them kneel and I would see her do herself part and I would, I would, I would.
Voice cleft this way and that, I am my voice, and I am scattered. A river of green slime runs off the cliff face of my nasal cavity to the caverns below – pressure buildup 1000 bars it’s the bottom of the Mariana and you’re on top and I’m all filled up. Drowning in a pool of gunk that splays the legs of my song in every direction. The notes in breaks surround like the whispers of people who aren’t there. Desperate pleas for my name and I am my voice but they have more voice when I am like this : all stuffed up, all stuck…
I sliced my finger open with the lid of a can of diced tomatoes. The crimson and scarlet swirled into a coagulant my brother was keen to pour over our chicken parmesan. And I, panicked by the wound, scampered to nowhere fast to hide my searing pain. All of this is true but it festers untreated, as I rely on myself alone. Then my brother knocks. And he finishes dinner. And I’ll never find the boundaries of his love. And the merits of vulnerability burn me up to a fresh, vital ash.
Cicada,
Where did you go, mellifluous creature of my heart? And why did you leave me this gift? So many months since the vivacity of your song carved out my aural cavities and filled them with the mold of summer. And still, your vacant legs cling to the bricks adorning my family’s door. Your eternal phantom knock reminds me of those moments where I was found. And lost, and still your shadow grants me not the least reprieve from nostalgia’s gruesome ache. How much of you is still there? An inch and a half of sungrown jubilee where I continue to plaster my misshapen mural.
Shouldering boulders these giants cannot be stood on. No room for chaff or wheat. Just stones and stones and stones sedimented into a perfect projectile to hurl at the rabble, the rest, below. My loves and I are ground to dust, one thousand stones rain down on each of us so the roles rend into our flesh piecemeal, our agony prolonged. And the giants gather up the gorey rock into a great mound to carry on to the next.
Collapse infinite suns into my black, black irises. Lease the supergiants to explode my cornea out my sclera in fiery supernovae. Astral orbit in cycles… all the light I can no longer see. Push the densified remnant cores to my cochlea and let the black hole make it such that the sound will never escape into me. Let its journey incinerate my trigeminal nerve: the flame that eliminates temperature. Some problems are too big for me to solve. I scream these things at myself in a purity of dissonance. Better to forgo resolution. Best to delve down inside, ice over to a permanent frost.
The slippery flipper glistens in the twilight’s moon-sun. A penguin’s song is between: flight and flightless. It does soar along torrents, plumes of riptide. Graceful, look at it now! Between: life and death. The race against the speed of seal fang, seal’s maw. Between scenes of family and play and destitution, frozen tundra. Should its last notes fade, would we call it no longer between? Is the penguin its every thing or only its last? Between: liminality’s embodiment is scar tissue. That without demarcation was never there, that which was never between never departed or arrived.
Silicon illness is a rash and what’s more tragic than that? This feverish still, pent up, all energy in rapid motion with no release: closed system bound for implosion. Our feral beatitude merits an open plain with ripe, full bodied gazelle and their tempted. Frenzied battlegrounds of expulsion like floral bloom bursts. Unencumbered stretches of earth furrowed in seed. Ground and spirit demarcates diversity in divinity. The peace of the temple, your loosed attachments, serenity in voluntary loss — and a community with which to justify them. Or disregard your chains, strap on the sanctified lambskin and let flow the water basin.
Inchoate