*

INSIDE IT

The funeral’s tomorrow, he tells me. Please come home, he says. Please come home and kiss me. All the parrots inside me have turned into elephants. Elephants on turned-up buckets. Elephants up on one leg, slowly revolving. Relax, dad, relax. We’ve got all night. You just talk, and I’ll follow you cage to cage.

****

Our bodies can see for miles. Circling and circling. In a blue sky screaming. I’m talking here of a baby dying. Its mouth filling with wind. This is where we all start to cry. A reek of music laced with blood. A church of fireflies, ringing blindly.
                   
****

In the rest of the universe there is no color, sound, ice, stone, arms outstretched, rain, love, torture, babies and funerals. Wine, spit, shit, roots and fire, hands, lips and cum. Friends dead and flags waving. A door into nowhere. Nothing.
                     

YOUR VOICE

Roots of fire spread through my tongue. Praising your body (every piece of it forked), my neck’s breaking——donkeys, hammocks and blue-lipped cups of wine. I’m gathering skulls of oxen washed up on a thin red shore. Rats raise up on their hind feet and devour me whole.

****

All day you’ve walked by the sea and the nets keep flashing. The boats keep rocking. A woman holds a fish against her cheek. She’s old, but she’s young, and she’s singing to it. Like water flowing through the courtyard of a temple and rising up into glittering oranges.

****

The lights through the slits in the wood make it seem like we’re going nowhere——tilting slightly forward and then back again. A dog’s chained to a fence. He might be shivering. He might be fine. He might be me, climbing down off a horse in a whorehouse, or an old-aged home. All these flowers have blurred me red.

A LONG NIGHT

You will die in shame. Haunted with regret. In agony, tails seething. In tall, waving grass. In cold, twisted heat. Down by the river. So green and so bright. Like bits of nothing. On your hands and knees, weeping.
                        
****

I’m with a girl in a long white dress. I am seven years old and it’s my birthday. In a bad mood I can see her on a table——cold, pale, dead. Monet said he felt like a monster when he painted Camille dying. The sun’s gone down, and the sky’s turning into the most extraordinary colors. And she’s telling me how lucky we are.

****

A wise man sat down under a tree and decided the path to enlightenment lies in annihilation. The ego and all its attachments. Fuck that. All my windows are towers. Gulls barking. Mirrors falling. You walk in, naked, sit down and spread your legs. I am fire. And it needs to hurt.