by J. R. Pearson
“To be young, to have a thirst for society,
to be hungry for a woman” Balzac in “Le Père Goriot.”
1.
You have two fingers & a wall socket
full of lightning. Insert. Repeat
until an unexplainable thirst for iron holds.
Take a short break. Get to know yourself a little.
Body image fading down corridors of television night.
Bright ghosts burning blue haze thru the sky's broken bones.
Welcome back!.. to your muted mouth glittered in hot gold.
To liquid sand from a poisoned silver skin.
You must believe this can all be summed up by the deaf
immensity of snow & your hatred of anything dead-white.
Instead, imagine a new body. A whole new you
plus no additional charge nocturnal cinema!
Dreams that come on in desert night like live-wire voodoo.
Think: braille bred in the bone
the texture of flowers that open tombs of suspect sentences.
Picture: sky tablecloths into 9 volt verbs
pressed to taste-buds.
Speak: this feels so unbelievable
without some kind of chemical dependency!
Wonder: do you have to sell skin to the sunrise?
Answer: no fine print written on the underside of eyelids.
Promise: as a fact all that's possible is a hard blink.
A tongue contorts into your arms
just the right distance apart.
Your heart is an eyelid curled with fingers.
Your heart is a snow-bright cataract.
Your heart is opening a large wet eye.
Your heart is an oven. You're ignition.
2.
Just think of it as the blind bandwidth
of tongue touching tongue.
The riddled rain in bubble casting of innocent falling light.
Thru an open iris the desert swims into mind
& unseen hands prepare volcanoes
for a distinct country's recasting.
It's serious. Thoughts full of august shade,
you forget that black boils
into moons rising beneath fingernails
into spoons over an open flame
into an addict's wish-sharpened needle
into ignitable veins clawed up arms
into this whole thing that keeps gibbering
a voice in my head and if I focus
on its mouth I can change the words
but they never never stop coming out
so I just form syllables into smoke rings.
Do you remember what mountains felt like as a child?
Do you remember what the skies were like as a child?
Wait! The moon's shade just arrived, watch starlight fall
like rhythm behind the eye for missing breath.
Don't worry, this can all be healed
with a scalpel's width & lungs spread like wings.
We're talking genetics honey.
Double-helix cash money.
Pain-pink pills & the cotton-crawl of a quasar
thru your chest. Put the universe to your mouth.
It's ignition. Decapitate your cybernetic girlfriend
with riffs from a lightningaxe. Ignition.
Maybe a sigh of the times?
That was rhetorical.
How many Richters will it take to raise the dead:
you're two adjectives away from the great American Killer.
3.
Born gutter smoke, wing welt & dance done,
nothing left on the dream hill leaves you felt washed.
Be whatever you have.
Harp-fisted angel of naked death for one.
Ephemeral scream fleshed to a golden
brown velocity for two. Open your mouth: a nation
of fireflies lift off from teeth bleemed to a smolder.
It was then I knew you would eat me alive.
It was then I knew the pleasure of drowning.
My burial plans include evaporation.
My burial plans include doppelgängers.
My burial plans include space-time.
My burial is the "blind crease in the song."
This poem has a pulse, proud as a spine.
Hold it! I remember you clear as an ice-age sold into sunlight
:whisp of c4 unfolded thru the flick of an eye
:nitro rubbed into lipstick a shade higher than plasma
:tar-dark loadstone in eyeliner: left a phrase in my head
:bones are a beach-blank canvas dreaming a still life;
tell me the sweet taste of twilight won't hold
in the second coming of your last breath.
Don't kid yourself honey. I know the temperature
that turns ice to fractured femurs.
Anger swims clear under its own weight.
Smoke flowers in your mind.
Brain full of bush flame. A dance detonates down limbs.
Seamless as a held breath that pulls fingers into fists.
Your iris blooms rivers.
It was at this time I knew you as the sharpened wind
in my chest. It was at this time we both saw this leading
to an event of perfect negative motion....
like nightmares without all the drama.
I have an irrational fear of dying kindly.
Promise: you'll shoot me into the sun.
4.
One by one a year of nights flash thru your face.
One by one I am a thousand untouched pages.
One by one syllables creep from your mouth in socks,
careful not to wake the brick of shade
with eyes like snow-drowned caves in the corner
of your mind. Volcano behind the hairline.
It's the lifting laughter that seeds the feral storm.
Glacial grift of the desert's slow advance
ripens in us like a haloed anger & heat stammers
into memory. This encrypted silence between us
is troubled with sun. For a moment, let's examine the topography
washed up on the corners of your mouth.
All opulence reduce to surf.
It cannot shake tomorrow; we are just recently a pattern!
Let's cycle thru this sequencing
& become the sole survivors of inertia's mistaken verve.
We're talking planetary erasure here.
Sol finally turns off its megaphone, we can sleep.
We've shaken the dice together.
It's all written before the advent of thought:
Pre-prophetic post-apocalypse melody-strung notes
by hoofbeat, heartboat, & heft that won't float
plus (for the first 30 callers) a sing-sung muffle
of prayer beads abstracted
from winged deified, mummified, exemplified
curious corpse that resists eyesight.
The cicadas are building in my spine
to heaven
to madness.
5.
Cure me honey & recant your favorite speech:
I, anonymous uterus of the universe
gave birth to you.
Four score & 15 minutes ago
(I am talking universal minutes!)
you were nothing without me:
a brilliant paper cut
a bloom in the blank between dreams
a vertigo curled around my cortex
a polyphonic thought passed into cloud
a S dash O dash S spelled in blind need
That not withstanding, there you were.
All choking wet & focus of light.
Arithmetic or arrhythmia? Doesn't matter.
After that I couldn't stop talking
about your unbelievable torso.
After that your exhale hit
me right between the eyes.
After that you were leftovers blown to bones.
After that you were banked
evangelical particle chances of ascension:
a placid face dropped in ripe ponds:
floods gushed thru the gate
left unlocked in your chest.
For now. Sleep. Beautiful, sleep.
Rumor acts like a mirror.
When we k ss your eyes d sappear.
When you walk that swing
my abdomen turns to mud. Again.
Your flesh, the last isthmus.
Your flesh, the last desert.
Your flesh, the last fossilized footprint.
Your flesh, the last ripe peach.
Your flesh, the final blackbird.
Copper sands crawl hand-pressed cliffs;
boulders never roll uphill
so let's trade minds & talk about me:
there he is blind lips in midnight shade.
Said he wants to feel your skull
on his fingertips. When lips meet
he whispers to his hands
that know your spine like a memory.
Says when you touch his ears fill with surf.
Wants your fingers to pound him into ivory
like an old-fashioned pianola...
& that's just about everything you'll ever need.
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