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Description
Eyeless sunflowers unfurl their angry shells,
trapped on the rectangular meadow of windowsill,
when I am not there, not at home except
a body wrapped in sheets like a ghost
evaporated by the rising sun.

The sky purples as though with the retching
blood from the mouths of thousands of bats.
They cut the sky in human shapes
like cookie-cutters in the now-quiet kitchen.

I do not exist except in darkness,
when the dust of my body ceases its baking,
and cleaning and reading, throws off the sweater,
unwraps phantom-limb covers,
and descends from the sky.

I am the messenger of this blind Darkness:
of things written in heavy beach sand,
tossed apart by waves-- footprints,
impressions of a thought I had made
earlier that day, but do not remember.

I write you again, in this sand,
in a body of mineral tough and thick,
covered with crabs like fleshy pink fingers.

your temples become thin, hard lines,
abstract, inscrutable;
unkempt like hair.

Ah, the hair! A bright halo,
the dense light by which I see
when my eyes bed down with Night.
Then remorseless limbs, ribs like walls
covered in ivy-like veins.
Tendrils upon tendrils-- I must sit and drink,
and rest.
Our hands tangle before you even have hands.

I give you the mouth and the beating blood:

Let us go, then, you and I! Let us go!

And that is all. And the savage voice
discovering soft ear shells
strewn messily about the head.
you give no Michelangelo, and the legs still wet
will falls like silt, and the fine soft leg-hairs
through my fingers; we cannot go.

Friend, unsuitable. The flowers see and spit
their brown moss like grave-dirt onto the plastic pen chained to the page.
Your eyes were messy pools of ink.
Mistakes. A leak.

Friend, A thing etched onto paper, or
into the eyelids that must retract like window shades
and leave the wearer lonely;
of things flung beside the squeaking bed
and sheets ravaged by dreamless sleep.