Read Me

First, read me.
The words
of myself, the words
conveyed in my
body, wound
in the tendrils of
my flesh, the codes
carved in my teeth
like hieroglyphs, my
bones, my hair
spells them out.
Read the novel inside of my
mouth, the alphabet
body has arranged itself, its
shapes conceived of an
ocean, a marriage, a laughter, the
swimming man and his
orchestra, fingerprints like
letters, the water song that they explain.

I enciphered these skins
as I released you,
wrapped them in the gauze
of our sleep
that encased us. And now you are out,
and now they remain permanently on you
like eyes on the wings of a moth.
Did you conjure these
teeth beneath the lips?
One-by-one romantically
like the keys of typewriters?
Did you conjure these notes upon my skull?
Stamped them out on the
bright area of your cheek. Pressed them,
and made a copy. Who invented the language of
ourselves?
She sleeps and the letters move, see.
The dream of them floats boldly to the surface,
a jellyfish, a turtle,
and only uncovers its eyes.
The light it emits enters the room and
shifts like shadows on the ceiling,
and all of it
circles the wise mirror.

Fog

The fog is tired
like an old horse.

It emerges
to find some help,

needing dental surgery,
the teeth have grown tree roots.

It rests the bottoms of its
rotten jaws
upon the red ground,
unwraps the gauze and ropes,
closes and opens the large black ball of an eye.

The leaves have gone mad
and killed themselves,
leapt from

the tops of
empty pails, skewered
themselves on the
tails of rats.

They make a bed full of
yellow razors.

Their notes are spelled
in
cut off beards,
down the drain,

their skin is bleached
with temperate weather.

Crucified Gnat

She is a giant on the
tiles of Rome.

She must have flown
poetically
into that john
in the restaurant basement,

there where a fat
shitting man
sweated out
yours truly, death.

Harpooned you on his bloody
fingernail,

quoted the Bible
while he
spanked
your crazy ass,
flattened you,
demoralized you.

Wow, you look like a shield.

I’d like to rip that wall out as evidence,
bring the case to court,
have his man
tried

for treason.

Sunken

The apartment, maybe,
is under water.

Our windows are holding back
this massive purple block, night, the nervous system
of earth.

Somewhere in the
cold depth
there is a glowing
worm
that spells out your name

in his
phosphorescent coils.

His brain
is an enlarged egg
that holds the secret of
man.

We drift along the bottom,
our sonar bonking,
wreckages of
ships
and mustached cadavers
and shoe husks
and trunks full of shit,

bird cages without
birds in them
anymore,

the ghost voices of our neighbors
wishing us luck
in the gloomy halls.

It is the apartment under water.

Dear God,
we don’t know how we
found ourselves here,

amongst these many
victims.

Watching A Woman Sleep

You went to sleep
inside my sleep,
and I had yet to let mine go.

I guarded it
with a shield, I moved over it
as a hawk moves over earth with his eyes and head.

Your face was the land, your
body was the black arc pressed
two-handed

into the sky. It joined the
paper puppets, shadow, in their
silent pews

as they worshiped the slow moving
head of their master,
their master is our master,

our master weighs close to nothing.
He is inside of the walls.
He is coming like laughter out of the dark,

our mouths are one
landscape.
I frame them with bone

marrow fragments,
the sweet charcoal. It is the
most ancient medium, primordial
as squid ink, pure as wine,

it lands in pools in our mouth,
sequence of numerals and letters
that is shaped like our sleep.

I have enciphered it.
Don’t worry. And I have enciphered it
with numerous codes.

Fall II

Leaves are keys on a chain
round the neck
of an old hardware store clerk.
He puts his white hands
in the pocket of his apron
and holds them together,
generating heat
out of the old
skinned claws. He thinks of the
blood within his veins, the sight of it
holding like ribbons
in the water of his bathroom sink.
Oh God, what was that?

These leaf keys
sell
for cheap, they
fall off
like hair off of the dead,

they form haunting faces
on the wet bricks. The faces look
like the clerk’s sons, his
brother
who drowned in a quarry,
and they mirror his very
DNA
like stairs.

How
flesh grows across a person’s face,

how organs flash brilliantly
like blades for that brief lifetime
and then dull,

how children’s futures are
stored in the attic.