Burdens

Come, I’ll clean my teeth with you

and stain the furniture with echoing pulse.

 

I didn’t want to diagnose us

a waterfall of butter and melted wires

waves of licorice pulsing off the cliffs

 

arching your shoulders to carry the moon

a platter of metal and earth

but here we are

and I’ve crafted a bar cart of your limbs.

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Texture

In the dialect of sapphire blinks

he said he could chisel slippers from the cold eclipse.

I reminded him to pluck the jewels from Orion

when he’s not looking and they’re left to curdle

in the jokes of Mercury, ripened and illustrious.

Black is flattering to my hips, but so are jewel tones.

I’m a winter in that sense, yet still so ignorant

in the fashion of tactile sensation and emotion.

Perhaps a sheer hare would do well for my calves.

A fox, rampant with flame and stoked with coffin velvet,

or a woodpecker with a wildfire in its laughter.

I look the best in demise and mourning –

these predators like a girl sadder than the dying moon.

But his tongue is softer, is warmer, than that. He says

this is all just beautiful, and so are you. I wear the furs

of a horror game sunset and call it a day.

Chassis

is the modern synonym for skeleton.

Marrow, a euphemism for hive mind: 

on better days, hormones. 

 

Head. I’ve learned to assemble the wiring

from IKEA pictographs and indecipherable

craniums. Home. I am nowhere near human

 

now – the scalp smells like an oil slick,

gathering the corpses of unfortunate beasts

in its tendrils like a greedy cephalopod.

Orchestral (NaPoMo 1)

It’s not the handstand of vision

bombastically tuning overworked retinas

but the fluidity of associations –

how the pupil learns to cartwheel

in response to fearful stimuli, its muscles

pulsing outwards in in A major

while the heart shrieks back into the womb.

It’s about sympathetic input and survival,

a sensory balance instead of eradication.

Living the perception instead of mastery.

Partnership. I’m Pavlovian to orange,

learning to pluck nerves in a violet range.

What it means when we say I’ve changed

I could fit my new voice into an intact walnut –

that I appear to be an unbroken surface when sap

leaks through like underwhelming whitecaps.

The nutcracker angrily spits out a new dialect

where coffin is synonymous with chrysalis 

and sin can’t be contained at the size of an apple seed.

I have simultaneously slumped and hardened,

a petrified sugar maple no longer viscous with sweet

edible things or forest offspring, prime as a kitchen island

propping up the fruits of another family.

What I mean is that my vasculature

may as well irrigate a wilted houseplant

and that we’re applying CPR to firewood.

The Melting

Welcome to the equinox of extended mornings, spreading

out their bubble gum tongues to taste our dehydrated faces.

If our dome can fit a world in one plastic dispenser, velveteen

muscle reaching out to sense the air like a curious mollusk,

then I’ve fit a whole hemisphere in the tip of a ballpoint pen.

In one radiant heat wave, I’ve pooled my mouth into a black

oasis of mud. I’ve lost half of myself and sense of ownership,

breathing through a new sea. Suddenly, I’m alright with this.

Bergamot

I hang my thoughts along the curves of a porcelain mug:

diced them into little bullets on a battered cutting board,

dunked them in a lukewarm blend of honey and earl grey.

Tea is liquid calm, cooking is therapeutic, so this should suffice,

I mutter, fragrant thunderheads boiled to life by flashing teaspoons.

They are thirsty and bitter, sliced like a shedding autumn

and swirling leaves in a tumultuous universe. As such,

I gorge on their anger and transfer my matter using heat –

suddenly, we are a flustered universe trying to expand

in a concord skull the size of a grape. I tell them melting is

reincarnation – they use cyclical, fatalistic, cannibalistic. 

I just sprinkle fine medicine in the brew and call it a night.