Tearjerker
Downspout
from the gargoyle’s mouth,
a city’s sediment
that escaped quenching.
What once was rainwater through
a most baffling sequence of events is now blood.
The metamorphosis explained
by the days you kneeled
past alleys foraging for lost goods:
water, love, lattes poured into glazed china,
the perfect gift, insignia
that might return the dead with the same wistfulness
they left you with.
The night went faster than bullet trains
through spider webs of silk thirst.
A tender shape you didn’t know the name of,
you longed for. You clung on to frayed muslin
your face had become, legs shipping
ambition across shimmering
lakes like masts of shrewd clouds tactically flailing
a patch of sky to wet to call home.
Do you remember visiting the woods where murmurations roost?
Did you find the shadow of your spirit animal there?
Last time the green storm came
the iridescence of so many seasons swept up at once,
the planet like a disco ball at a new year party remained
the only witness
to the devouring of light produced by it.
Rainbows stamped
by yanked out band aids, colored by wavelengths —
monotonic from being administered strong doses of dopamine.
The birches stood alongside you
with chewed barks like nude statues,
their fig leaves fed to unsuspecting rodents.
Children and animals craning their heads to a shroud
of rubied constellations. Blood below swathing valleys.
Blood above tracing dots.
How mountains powdered into roasted sugar.
When you recall now, you suffer for salt.
See how you ask me to blow ash into your eyes.
See how you drink your tears
when you think I’m not looking.
Triptych of the Insomniac’s 3 am hungers
in the city of crackling dirt the sun tumbled down
almost trampling us over finally resting behind
the barracks of men who plundered the pink paint
of new rooms guiltless all this while knowing
there will soon come a time they would breathe in hiccups
the vanishing absolution of distant scents arose from windows
of upturned cellars claiming centuries of chasm and victuals
heirlooms and myrrh tongues gone awry after mistaking blood
for cocktail eyes for oysters how those avocado mouths begged mercy
from clouds that couldn’t be cudgeled to rain while I got doused
in the storm my hair stayed erect for days from the electrostatic
charge I gleaned from the dead I could never get drunk enough
in love dark wine flowed purple straight through me
and I didn’t have the audacity to say: stay
phrased long smug sunny like endless pixels
on low simmer the words from my grandmother’s
mouth bristling wisdom and tangy orange she spoke
in sentences and silences both: the length of trains
crossing one another on adjacent platforms
you give one person one life you get two dioramas
and floods infinite my mother too taking after
her mother gentility of aging jaw the red-white flesh
of gums watching for eternity the prodigal tongue
wrestle in the precincts without knowing the consequences
of slippage cane twisting arms coiling the perverse rock
of my dying force that entered a molten crater harnessing
a hardness to make my first mind there my meditation
ended when the stones on my knuckles tasted like cake
my favorite teacher from school visits at the end
of the dream tells me after class if a process becomes its own
celebration it’s one sure way to know: you love it when I try
writing harder I break the pen’s nib and ink traces the longest line
on my palm like a child learning about the Nile for the first time
will you take a look at these hands abstinent through a lifetime
of milk my friends don’t believe this impossible sainthood
but I did give way to reams of sea at the point inside the cave
where stalactites and stalagmites met soon my tongue hissed its way
to the edge of the cliff overseeing the city of dirt dazzling with dust
and insoluble fate I think if I have children I will ask them
to come here and dine once for breaking bread on watery heights
taught you the language of a stoic lover tendered you
in winking halves the navel-eye of the pleasured monk
The Performance
1
The stage they sent me to
had an invisible audience. I was directed to deliver
an impassioned speech. I took a while
to reason— in that sacred square ascertained
by plots of cartesian rhythms, a turf where love
for the self and other bodies like a burning mouse tears
through weeds, hacking, heaving a blunt sickle to engender
astonishing patterns of volition— erosion marks revealed
the anonymous nature of loss: lumps tousled, reminiscent
of the afterlife of bones: something between silent mulch
and creosote.
2
Despite so many flickering hypotheses,
the only real finding: how much I’ve pined
to get something right; most of all, a conclusion.
After I was complimented, my sweat felt like dry ice,
acid scent simmering joy and sheepishness
in pits
where hands begin for I was certain— there must live people
that deserved this feeling more. In my next project, I wish
to bear conjunctions, the size of haired bodies,
one friendship to another. I will you to give
you and me at times, the finest of me and you respectively.
3
What is transformation but transaction burned at dawn
on peaks of huddling winter hills: incentives
your mother gave for every school test you aced: mystery
novel, bicycle, diorama of the solar system, or terabytes streaming
through a subconscious as if we were translucent hard drives
plugged profoundly into crevasses of clandestine blue black
screams. Simple harmonic motions as kismet— oh I was looking
for this word when they asked me to wrap it up.
4
Minutes later, I’m in the audience behind stern
plexiglass cloaking disposition watching a head
trundle across the stage, muttering, his face empty
but attire suggesting it could only be one person; the theatre’s
booming speakers rang : you’re a tender thorn, a pickled flower :
the images perhaps reserved for specimens witnessing
in harmony spread over the canvas of years, their personal
lobotomy, the words in the bloody voice
of the saint who once took immeasurable pains to birth me.
