Scroll

My sacred parchment scroll, in love with me, descends to Earth because I crave romaine but accidentally gives language to the world. This is a morally neutral fact. god takes credit in spite of all the evidence. Of course he wants to seize a blessed wet muscle full of tasting, and corrupt it to law.

Me and my scroll live in the turret, fishscaled in gold. Three hundred lightyears tall. The one room, crystal. Stars burn in.

I nestle with her. She lets me have one word per day, slowly unbuttons my rictus spine into marrow. Infixed with turnstroke letters I press inside each cheek, the wet carapace, firm coruscations against my finger. Each letter sizzles as it hits my spit. More marrow than shell.

Letters unpeel themselves to rearrange their dental pleasures, buzzed against the stars, my skin, seeping. The sheets of parchment toothed and tight, detensed and infinite in my softer palm. The left.

Diseasoned up here, skin burns with starshine. I forgot how to blink against pure light due to letters crawling up my nostrils, sinuses, ocular nerves, crackling in my pupils.

A camera comes down from the nowhere. It’s god with blinking red light ON. Hovers there in a very nothing kind of way. Beeps. Low battery. Ringing its bells with urgent destruction. Life pressed under gravity stones. To the insane awakening. Back to the first syllable. Not calcified yet. Not muddied with anything but that perfect mud.

That street is unsafe! The neighbors are always calling the police! What to do with the tongues used to slice minds.

I want to want to love them. Can’t, though my mouth is thick with haptic cedar. Scroll is a pro at holy love and knows when anger should enlarge.

Wade here, she says, back into my night. Assures, in pricks of pixels. Fills me with tobacco tears, cumin sweat, faint iron ink. Three thousand year old rusted nib. Emerges rocksoft, with a plink.

Our practice of night. Of always night.

For the cracked letters in my mouth, nose, eyes to crown. Make me—right—

On the mountain

Roaring choral, a thin-planed place
where obsidian glass clangs squarely
               into formless mass, deshafted
into clear-clawed pine, pluridextrous
             and wafting with soft-composed heart,
washed in silt and blood on undershirt
           and dried peach rings stuffed in fingerslips
that sift thru loam and renderings
         of fear in body when garmented by the touch
of external player, a lover-ghost
         or hand of self at five. This is the generous,
the sui generis, the purely aware
       of fucking for the sake of the deeptime galaxies
that spin off from it, entropic
         yet as perfect-formed as green-gulched lichen
or pirate argot. We hold each overweight suitcase
        packed with dildos and rocks. How much space
between my hand and yours would be filled by
        consciousness twinning mists of different temperatures
coalescing into cloud and forming other systems,
seal of ochre dust, clink of steps, animist

at 4 a.m.

& waking me with long slow strokes down my back
to bodies’ two edges
water-sphere meniscus flotsam and rot of seaweed
& planetary furred & lightyeared but wishing near
& waking sick sick sick with exhaustion
of dimensionally edging of clammy cuddles
& fusional traction
the view up the chin of men like me born sphinxes
their feral cherry-sour musk
of milk
of iron
of fecal jasmine
& infections under my nails
& milkteeth & skin so soft
it will tear me apart
it will form flagella & whip me
& it will tell the story of a king
plaster hawk on veiny forearm
who hallucinates for his kingdom
both walls and treasures
unctuous blue silk-satin
sunred glass pomegranate arils
honey like honey like dripping like honey
down a throat sore-dry for decades
& desire it is that
o rose sick sick sick
pressed between arms
no rose-thing grows