Assembling the Spirit

The spirit can spread open again, in a circus of heat.
Assembling at night with the rhythm
of gathering and eating within a known circle
(like a folk song, a well-worn idiom).
I can feel it pull away from the cold lake
and start to relish the delicate force of the light.

The moths tap the glass, the sky a brushed velvet
dropped over them.
It folds and relaxes as a muscle of water,
and arrives at horizon's mouth like a dark
banked knot of grit.

The paper-white window frames a lantern of play
and occassional stops;
In this, stillness thickens.
The slow end of glass, a sound pulled as thin
as elastic
camouflaged as silence.

My hands wrap and grip, pull and push
slide and trace the contours of fiber and grain.
Each pulse is a brilliant world.
I measure and ladle with processional calm;
converting whispers to touches.
Bright lemons, nubbed olives lash like thorns
from their brine -
plucked and speaking.

The spirit puckers and throbs in this.
The mantle of purpose glows heavily down
and insists - come forth, come fully forth,
spring forth into heat.

The Carnal Light

the prescience is a dread-lust;
this still small violence of grief
and hidden breath is as dark a stain
as month-blood.

the abdomen pitches sickly, brightly.
the gut abandons and the chest becomes
a rattling crushed hull
of lost, half-remembered creatures
and wrong-strung wires.

what have I done, become, becoming?
only the truly created stone
that I ever was.

In essence, the question is not
'what will this be?' but, instead
'what prosecution of the self was ever
right at all?'

the carnal light is honed and through
the fog of robbing voices
it is the only light of reason.
reason, reason,
rational life.

posess me and dig the wound out
with your claws, your teeth,
your bared bitter bones.
own me, make me translucent
still.

The Accuser and The Womb

I am here buried deep, horizontal in silt
of your calls and your crying out loud -
and I saw, by the lick of the moon's shining throw,
a question hook out from your mouth.
It rushed at me quickly, imperative force
springing out like a child's eager legs;
I did nought but clutch at the crest of my womb -
nought but point to the hollowed out space.
My eyes are like ivy, they clutch and they curl
searching for similar fear -
but your features are jigsaws with pieces left out,
with leaping and jittering feet.
I will leave, I will go, I will run from your house
free of the glare of this sun
and rock with my womb - curled asleep in my hand -
empty and useless and grey.

Sorry

Pierce the membrane of this country
and joy flows out with salt and blood.

Once we floated sickly, limply tossed around.
A bag of gelatinous politick,
greyed miserly sloth presuming
to supress terrors charred and seething
in the dim-lit misted past.
The glance of silver as our eyes alit on truth
was too much to bear;
the hustle of the massacres
the come-from-gut screaming
the marrow-curdling gene bleaching
and all of us, for all of us,
a reaching for a relief
not coming.

Yet now, look!
What are these wonders startling out
like starlings in the new light?
Change thrums in us, pulses and quickens
and suddenly a nova of life crashes forth
calloo, callaying
demanding to be heard and smashing
the Jericho we never wanted built.

Sweet relief, release.
Pierce the membrane of this country
and joy flows out with salt and blood.

Owl

I veer from the light;
pupils, dark drops of hot pitch
burning in the night.

Rubber Head

and like a rubber head my brain is settled
in a jar of filth and floats among debris
of love. And precious memories rot now;
not so much alive as they are kicking
my insides

fragile? not a word, I say. At least
it's not for me when you see how I dissemble -
full of trembling hate for skin and
temptations of the carnal kind; my body
bathed in tar

yes, like a rubber head my brain is settled
in a jar (ignored) and waiting for the cork
to pull and vent the waiting fumes into the air.
Alone, alone, the jar will sit, awaiting
studying eyes.

Reimbursement

Birth is tantamount to a promise, a well wish
from a weeping cock and an opening womb.
The inspectors should have come,
with iron bars for your brain
to bang you into shape
and a writ for your life as tight as a frame-up.
That would have made it right.
But they missed the blood over the door;
your clever tongue licked the jamb clean.

Let me back in to her, this is my petition;
you loom too large with architecture -
already breaking my toes for the bandages.

None of my colleagues heard me yelp the air in;
I didn't hear them, then.
When we writhe out in your slick mess
we're at a loss, a panicked loss;
genesis grabs the roots of the senses
and yanks the strands out in a rush.
(Later they came with tulips,
the gasps banging them together like pins.)

I promised you curtsies, too young
and consented in complicity to hold back
the landslide of flint these flesh walls kept bound up.
But quick, look up! A hush falls.
Now the beams have broken
and we burn, embracing, our claws alike;
we fall arranged around each other,
a nick running a tide along my back
deftly
neatly
opening the clear seam...

...at last.