Winter Carousel
If I crack open an imported coconut
& carousel horses stream out like gold
embossed milk. If I sip the milk-paint
from sunset hued manes, brighten
my tuneless tongue. Bleed across
the pale green saddle like my sex freed.
If moondust carnations bloom from polar
bears’ raw, winter-soft jaws like tundra
kissing the equator. & I leap, cold &
Arctic fox-pelted, between the teeth-
haloed heads of half a dozen harp seals.
Between the glossy, varnished borders
decorating a partial world map.
If I sand every remaining meridian line
into smooth ocean. Clench my jaw—
all angelic, all fox. & tend to, am tender
to a garden beneath the midnight sun.
O, I carve a carousel from oven-warm
macaroons, then ride a milk & wood pony
off the map’s edge & onto the moon.
Another Blue World
I sleep iridescent. Blink the spring
azure of my irises: hidden to star
-ing. Sky to twilight’s glancing prey.
I pin the flight-wrought delicacy of
my thorax to a simple cork board,
display my aorta’s small splay. I
confuse myself for an extinct species
of moth. Pretend the dusk-dust
can shimmer my imagined wings
& an imagined compass-less wind
into being. Pretend the air doesn’t
flake like rust ed yesterdays
in the hands of time. In the hands,
my hands, pinning this life up on
display. Simultaneous myth making
and self(less) forgetting. An endless
non-REM night spent decorating
others’ rooms, others’ minds.
Other(s’) worlds.
Ornamental Rust
A sagittal plane, formed by, say, a mirror
held perpendicular to the sternum, cuts
the gentle beast of my body into right &
Latin’s sinister. The vanity-bruised Yggdrasil
of my bronchial tree; the bent light of a punch
to the gut. Every sunrise greeted by a first or
third quarter moon—half woken, half wrapped
in REM. Every moonrise the staccato envy
of a wound for the blood to rush & rust-leak
back into. To ornament the body’s sky like
bloodletting by leech made tainted reversal.
Architecture of an Ending
is blueprinted on iridescent beetle
casings & the velvet listening
of rabbit ears. In the blue-black bruise
of squid ink & the ghost milk
of my left eye’s vitreous humour.
Design drawn to the scale of hauntings.
Windows like widows. Doors to
accommodate the dear & the damned
—virtuous, vicious entrance.
Floor plan overlaid with secret passage
-ways, inlaid with secret markings
directing one away—skyward, dirtward.
Toward the apocalypse of a utopia.
All The Little Hopes
like starlings or kindling or end
-ling. Murmuration of lasting
flame, last flame.
The embodiment. The liquid
warble, the mouth’s delicate
pucker around combustion.
Around the epilogue that tastes
only of hunger
—succulent suckling
of bone marrow & dental pulp
from the sly grace of another (self).
Another (faith in) tomorrow.
(In its trembling, its darling.)