Everything enters the bloodstream, so if you say I love you,
I can bleed it out. I can bleed it out.
So, too, I can preen myself
like a pelt with a svelte tongue
that comes directly from your
mouth. From your mouth, without a lid, I can fetch a susurrus
like circling the maypole in a sweltering
bloodletting self-erasure: my
ribbon’s residue eddies into me,
becomes me, a mutual seizing: I leave
on it a sweat-stained paw print as I pant the parade around, pant
the fray around. Excelsior as sonic prayer,
I can detect the resonator through
my over-heated husk and it feels
serrated like a dry suckle, a dry spell,
a dry dizzying bell. But such is deliverance. I’m a duet with the
epidemic songanddance, its endemic
trance, mnemonic seesaw teetering into
intense trespass, this then that, the lightning
crash of our highest tessitura, ever-
forward, not back. Wilting, ultimately ululant when winced by
the voltage of severance, mind from
body, mind from body, pinched by
a delirium, embodied and disgorged, hollow-
boned and heavy, the delirium repeats
its dire dictation as a bursting heat in the pit of the windpipe,
a sore soaring in the cords, the rhythm
broken, replaced with a heavy-handed
thirst, a parchment, a terse displacement
of tongue. Upon stopping, we go slick
into the sickness of stillness. It doesn’t stop moving. Its nerves
tingle like tethered stars caught in our
head-jars and jilted, jangled, or like we’re
full body soap-stung, bee-stung, or hack-
strung by our own lack of breath. Vertigo
goggles us. Letting go of the ribbon, letting go of the rhythm
is like a limb gone missing: the hand sings,
the hand sings, the hand sings for its
other. A contagion, this blazon ring.
As such, cessation should be a blessing,
but after such brazen joy, our vital signs re-reify—we’re not
gods—our former reign over ecstasy is
revoked with a spittle-blond substance
starching our throats, an operatic fever
and inoperative shit-for-brains; we
become vessels for incurable half-goat, float-inducing dream-
states, self-racing the irrational. In one
such hallucination, a small rabid
animal—bulbous anonymous mammal,
reduced to indistinguishable silhouette—
meets its death in the profanely shaped half-cruciform crawl-
space of a Victorian porch to the sound
of continuous steps, caught foam-
mouthed and unfurling in the cross
arch, puzzled-frantic by the light through
the latticework rather than the crisscrossed dark. Yes, it’s all
dreck under the deck. No, you can’t
play there. Mother to child. But the child
is drawn to dark. You are drawn to
the dark. Note to self: Nevermind.
Currently, amidst the unevenness, there is no access to the self,
it’s rerouted to a lark song sung by a vole
or a hole in the heart in the head.
Mad songs are all that make sense in
malady, immured to the vacuum birth
of nonsense, a nuanced nothingness measured, unmeasured,
applauding its ever-apparent peals, and
when the lure of intolerable melodies starts
to heal in the blue of a blue hour, blue
replaces black and you start to come back.
* * * * *
After mid-summer, I spend a week in bed. When I can get out
of bed, I get out of bed. The world went
further into summer while I slept, more
terminal, tiring slightly of its more frilly pinks,
yellows, greens and reds. In the open air,
I stand a figurine for the wind to curate my skin, to be curried
and weaned by the living beings it carries
and excretes: its transmissions, spills,
unspoolings: its miscellaneous missiles.
The vista oozes sunbeams or a bloodbath,
same thing in the crux of a thickspun heat spell, vision
scalded by a boozy overlay of razzle
dazzle, translucent sanguine and rose.
In such a squint, it starts to feel like I can
love again, erect a bouquet (the buzz-kill
of buds), slap the bugs sucking the blood beneath my skin.
I’m the gnat’s epicarp and consequent
peach. All has gone-to-seed in me.
My body starts to crave a counterpart,
a link as arms-length as a maypole ribbon,
a dart-point that draws you to the center of something
moving—and you are moving with it,
subservient, knave-diligent but
necessary, a dressing of unclear
wounds (which may or may not be yours),
an addressing of the wound’s source (which may or may
not be your specific body)—and round
and round you go always risking
the sentiment of insistence again
and again and again, somewhere the circle
begins and ends but to keep going is to extend the turning’s
fixed point—it isn’t physics nor physiognomy—
but the fear of flesh as polestar, end-all,
appellation. I resist the roundness
of my body’s landscape, like a lost package,
a plump and placid stump, something too obvious to be proof.
The escape is unopened. Blunt, it is always there.
(Blunder: It is always where.) I am always here,
but I don’t care: the stakes are higher
than the formalities of a here. It’s always
an elsewhere I’m aiming for, an egress quite alien in
its element (non-periodic) wherein
the stirring’s inferred, internal, turning
outward. The premises are imprecise,
likened liminal with ludicrous twirl.
The intended flight is not an exodus terminal as taxidermy;
but altogether, still it severs. The body
doesn’t settle. Infectious urges make me
plummet to the plight of a parasite that enters
the bloodstream through a murky stream
and untames, unleashes its bloom, squirms up to intoxicate
the brain. Everything seen enters the blood-
stream. Everything unseen enters the blood
stream. Everything enters seemingly without
shame. If I’m muddied, I’m muddied, my feet
aren’t fully mine. It’s like putting a syringe of sugar water
into me—there’s something of bitter
sweetness to be gleaned in the prick, its purge
and push-forth. The blood has no oath.
The wet plume of vein accepts its slurry, its
new birth. It has all the artifice of a simple recipe. But I’m
changed. I’m not the same. I’m vagrant as a
wound. What enters me makes me its surrogate
meat. I’m buttoned by it. It embellishes me. I bleed
because I bleed. I boast blood, keep going.
All is nacreous-stricken on a nature walk when clouds
and sun compete. It’s the only explanation
I need. In the open slate, the clouds reincarnate
continuously, cleanse their bodies of their
bodies. I’m part of the implied feast, seen through
heat sensors. In the new stupor, you acquiesce with your
blessings, your bent alchemy, the lessening
of daylight. In the open field, the promise of
petrichor, a precipice. You can feel everything.
In bold light, the freak air completes itself,
becomes a kind of sub-light made visible with various tiers
of dander and dust, specks of floss and fluff.
Until chance-planted, they are ancillaries to
nothing. They turn the breeze into their back-
ground, their instrument of free-for-all and flight.
The pollen gets stranded in the sealant of me; I’m its
stranglehold. A beholden grave when
inlaid, I’m not the yoke it needs. All it can bloom
in me, if you please, is a cough, a sneeze,
a stroke of bad undertuck in the nostrils.
Lostwards, not lost. I walk and toss my touch on glossy
objects. My fingertips are the stuff
of poison when poised on the butterfly’s wings,
the caterpillar’s till-like crochets, the petal’s
half-bell. I sense a violation in their foreign breaths—
or a browning—as if I emboss them with a chill, a tremble,
an erupted must. What passes is tantamount
to a breach of trust in the guise of a gust
of blustery air. A resistance wordless, but
inferred. When I pick up the feather, I do not detect
the threat of an avian influenza. Nothing burrows in the fur
of its flute. But I’m its fluke. Through touch,
I become germ-absurd. Something transfers,
something blurs. I pick up a feather
and become something of the bird.
