I strangled my broken memory of a horse
Into a clod of potter’s clay, painted it poorly:
Victory red when wet, now spiced mud.
The others eat potatoes without salt.
One fries onions in the bottom of the kettle.
I, their idiot father, inhale the fat in the air,
And rub my heavy bread-and-beer gut.
Today I was a sun dog, waiting restlessly to rise
At noon, alongside my mother, and puncture the sky.
Though my cue never came. Hurt,
Like the paunched rabbit hung up
Before me, I watched my blue entrails
Thud onto the wood-effect vinyl flooring.
My surrogate Turk aunt warned me,
Of the dangers of painkillers in times like these.
I explained, it’s only for my skull-splitting
Aches and the bulging pain behind my eye
That brewed last night, while I overslept,
(Dreaming of impostors in the NBA
And the end of days). So I chew the pill,
Readying up for my 4 o’clock early
With the rottweiler who beams back at me
From the wet, black mouth of my boiler room.

The clotting of ore makes ingot, simply.
Electrical storms skip and lurch through
The dark dust clouds that circle around clapped hands,
Just as blood passes, unrelenting, through singing pipes.
For now, nothing is equal: all is equal to itself
And industry understands only three emotions:

A jewel bug found on an upturned stone,
Put under the jackhammers, the sand rammers,
Washed upriver in a molten current, along
With the crude and the brine, body ruined
And memory banished, to fold into the great grey pull,
Seaward, to tumble up on churning concrete tides.

Excavators leave their bite marks in clay
Ashen soot itches on the back of a knee,
And reveals itself inside a lung long after.
Water and earth were not meant to marry,
(Only coexist), and so they make mud in protest.
Boots are scraped off at the end of the working day.

Fail under black gravity and drown in reverse.
The palette of the sky wanes, as The Firmament shudders
She may never heal, her loving grace is not unlike oil
Or gemstones. Over the lowly, all-stirring chiefdoms
Of industry, their might and their misery, Her rejection
Of the hammer hangs like the jawbone on the inside of a cheek.

In the airport, I saw that blonde had prevailed,

Taking gold over the slivers of sky, of platinum,

Tin hats, of my silver plastic toy that skims

Now, across white caribou hide, sewing shut blue lakes.

The plane’s innards are clad in chain mail.

(Mine are not). The potable air hostesses know this,

They give me dark, medicinal gut-rot. Bilberries:

The cause and the cure. I cradle myself

Beneath a great, sky-borne tree, levitating over Moscow,

Who sleeps still [static] under cloud-sea.

With bow-curved mouths, bullet-nosed and suited,

They draw down shutters against loud, lonely noises

That scrape the skull like a truth drug —

Phantoms slamming against dirty chalkboards

To leave warnings scribbled in pink & white.

I haven’t yet found the first word

The one that validates all others

So when I move my mouth to speak

I reveal the tragedy of empty sound

Would I accept this, my last decision?

I would walk to the quiet mountains

I would cut off my tongue and eat it there

It would better serve me in the form of food

Time is not a constant,

But porous, distended matter

And the mind must have mortal bones

That buckle under such complete encumbrance

As this, solitude in the early morning.

I lay still, toppled clay golem
You sleep, deep and animated
Against my joyless insomnia

(Dreaming of rabbits?) No, bone-saw
Flee, they turn and see you, now flee
Flee on short limbs, four red stalks

In my ballooning, musing ego
I put these tremors in you
This brooding traversed two skins, osmotic

Plasticine bull-demons, horned men
Stalk through blackened infirmaries
Casting voices of lost family

My violence becomes your twisted wrist
My frustration becomes your bruxing
I am fearful and so you shiver

Impossible deserts, impossible sea
Tunnel through glass dust dunes
Paint tell-tale scars across soiled skin