O! lonely day!
The yellow butterflies once circling now collapse
Tainted with the scent of unrequiting.

So we come to some affair
Full of champagne and sweet crab claws -
The locking, clocking, clicking bones of arthropods -
Like the parents of Rebecca.
Anonymity persuaded me
And for years I took solace in resolute composure.
Now, too late, I hear the wicked rattling of the hours:
Baying hounds praying
Till all arteries wither and crumple in my body
And I fold in upon myself.
I am of the era of solitude-
Today I woke and saw four walls and inside stomach-creatures weave their cruelty

Everyday I turn to feeling
Like the last surviving toxin
In a sanitized world.
Watching death throes of bacterial beings,
The noble battles of viruses without virtue
Against the best efforts of clean men in white suits.
Let us fight and stand and rebel for filth,
For messiness, clumsiness -
We imperfect clowners who do nothing right.

Cream-filled pastries smothering a tray:
We pluck them
And like plugs, they stuff us shut.
When words have failed us,
With thick cream bubbling from our lips,
We communicate with our eyes closed and our fingers flying,
Our scrabbling hands prickling on the dryness of each other’s skin.
Each flake a straight-edged razor.

But hands clutch at emptiness so easily -
Subtract, divide, less always more, they say.

O muse! Tell me the glory of our past fathers!
(And the bilious violence of dead bodies strapped over razor wire
When he watched his brothers separate themselves from their inner parts)
I need stories of fame and holiness
Of Sir Francis Drake, whose pirate homeliness morphed into defiance
Sing to me songs of nation-states! Of the sword and the robe,
Where once my family stood
Taking ‘Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense’ to the grave.

Today I opened 389 doors
All leading to a white room in the bowels of the sky.
And I crawled out from inside the shattering earth
Turning myself upside-down, stretching out my shape
Until it burst forth from the cold, dead, heart of the world
Simmering at the crust, brushing off magma
Setting off earthquakes and rumbling the great seas until, at last,
In the white room,
I sit and stay, and knit blankets alone.

So the hallelujah chorus
Announces forth their soloist
But she is mute and always has been
(Once she tricked them with false voices)
She bears her secret of silence within her breast
Burning, cauterizing when kept still

The organs, red and soon purpling, corpulent
Blood vessels bulging inside skin
Hair fibers growing unused
Uncared for.
Until the body becomes a pin cushion
All bristling, prickling on the inside.
Fingernails twisting into fantastic shapes that
Will leave black puppets on the wall
And remain unseen.

Who will sleep on the floor for us?

So as we die in separate homes
(just as god intended)
We hope so desperately something keeps growing -
And we give ourselves over to the sacred, private mound,
Standing defiantly as the shadow falls with vap’rous night:
Arthurian, lands of warlords claiming even tombs as their own.
Death, the ultimate ‘isn’t,’ becomes yet another article of possession.
Who will lay upon us gladioli?
Even as I spin the walls of my casket
And face the company of the roots of willow trees

‘Fantastic garlands did she make
Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies and long purples’
Wretched, foul, thing!
I don’t love you and I don’t plan to!
(You hear her cry, you know because she makes it obvious)
(But what if she lies and only wants your ribcage trembling above her breast?)

I have heard the elegiac verses.
Your poetry was never
Written for me – but when you singed the edges to summon the quiet voices
I thought my face might mock you from the fire.
No, crackling logs will never be my voice, for green gardens consume me.
Smothered by the scent of gardenias
Gagging back on the heavy odor of decay and white roses.

Once I held it -
- I must have, I believe.
Because if romantic and square is hip and aware,
Then I think I have owned romance.
All shatters, you grinned.
Come back, I whispered into the nape of your neck.
Too wise for pleas of passion, you kept yourself alive
With restraint and the briefest evening.

Mother- she decries me!
The resentment, easy and slow
Builds, cracking my bones (like popping corn in a kettle pot)
Under steady pressure -
Orange fire erupts because there is no hand to hold.

Sister – she defies me!
Ignoring the scuttling of my many limbs across the floor.
All legs, hurrying and hungry
Keeping promises with corpses under
A newly-borne shell.

You and I, we turn on the television
And watch the static -there is sick comfort in the black flecks furiously
Copulating with the white spectacle of the emission
Until it switches to
This
Is
Only
A
Test.
And my eardrums, tight and warped
Bear the pounding, the nascent nasal drilling.
But I miss no voices (oh no, never do)
For I heard none
Not even when I could tell the song of a sparrow from a crow.

He thumps his Bible coarsely on the table
(The strained, disparate thwack)
And sharply draws his plump, sausage-finger bones together.
(Muse, show me his wicked steeple of hands and the poesy of skin)
They sniggered that ‘he was saintly, but he wasn’t a saint,’
And mocked his prayer-books while changing their tires.
His face, a mass of searching headlights
Against the cool disinterest of his God.
His wife, she chirps like a nervous chick…
While in his room – but does she love me?
Deep-down, he is sure, but smothers that certainty.

We will have no more marriage, you told me.
And when my mailbox turned anorexic,
Anemic, too, and pale,
I assumed I could write you out of my skin.
Too late I learned that crossmarks cannot be erased.

She said ‘My name is sad Isabelle and I am at sea,’
Like a declaration of one-ness and isolation.
Never touching, but always pressing fingers against the glass
This is no vaudeville jest, you cannot fall through the mirror.

He said ‘My name is St. John and these are the snakebites on my limbs’
Meaning that he was born under a wheel and the sign of summer
Never breathing true air but the false pollution
Always sequestered – so is it exile or masochism?