CENTESIS

I know where they keep Satan locked up. He's disassembled, in large pieces, behind fences with razorwire and gates that are closed at night. During the day you can go visit his head, stashed between event trailers and some junkers baking in the sun. He is missing his jaw-- he is reduced to a massive, LaVeyan cranium with squinting, pupilless eyes; cheeks tightened in a grin half excised and stuffed elsewhere in lockdown. Somewhere there his batwings and barbed tail are mothballed too, but I never bothered to look. I never bothered to go inside to pay my respects. I just drive by, several times a week. I'm always driving somewhere, aren't I?

Yesterday I drove in the almost-countryside. There was a house with a yard hidden from the road by willows and mulberry trees. I could see through in one place, into a zone of our double murder. Piles of broken white plastic furniture, shaded blue by the diffuse light from the bluegrass. A cold-place blue-- an outer-blue place I could never go. A part of the world blue where You don't exist. Erasure blue. Investigation is the vector of the curse. Ushi no toki mairi. Investigation is the breaking of the curse. Witnesses, witnesses. Inversions. Now you are writing the spells and I'm stabbing your doll. Right in the heart. Drawing down your breath. Breaking the rules. This morning I Iooked up at the sheets of rain, and I saw shiranui in the sky, through the rook ramparts of the heavy trucks waiting to crush me out like a cigarette, or like a beetle. I'm so used to being watched I don't even notice. It's nothing. I'm nothing. Just a messenger, like Ayesha, only clothed in noctuidae.

Ashes of thought. Of will. Mosquitos have become so small that you can't even see them against the grey grey light we are left with. Their centesis is the vector of our disease. All my blood's blue has gone to murder and be murdered. I have mislaid its chroma key. I'm being sampled, bitwise, having my bloody points described so I can be mathematically turned inside out like an obscene manifold. I'm a surface made of other surfaces, like a patchwork of gore. I'm both your patchwork woman and raw material for your next quilt. Practice for your next fatal psychosexual suicide pact. Who will take Satan out of his cage and put him back together? All the king's horses, no doubt. Here is the red wide way then, raw and bleeding; here is the militant illuminated in laser light-- all that is left is for you to strike. Abort and terminate in one release.

A possible semiosis is that aspect of an octopus which reaches into elsewhere; blue broken yards where we do not exist. Razor yards penetrated by its searching tentacles, shunting my curses, hostelizing fear and certainty of decay-- biting with its beak, back into the apple of love's promise, strangling with its inky braided intentionalities our protesting necks, shuffling away, collapsing, and dealing out certain other fictions-- other cards drawn against the rules, against secret conduct in condemned half-lives. Lucy rising with nipples bloody, bitten hard by crooked teeth-- hard-edged angels with plastic swords, hollowing out pumpkins with guarana firebreath, to lay at olied, nymphal feet. To guard the holy flaming triple fuckscene as the ragamuffin hordes slump past.

All yards are beds, all beds are windows, all windows are open graves. Blessed be the gawkers.

S ORI 52

Everything happens infinite times. Has already happened, somewhere in our eternal past. Ask Susskind, not me. All I have are fictions. Maybe we really are coasting the mobius; maybe we'll come again. Sometimes planets are ejected from their birth systems-- some cataclysm with no witnesses but themselves. They wander frozen through the dark, barely changing. Only a few particles and some radiation for company. Sometimes they encounter vagabonds like themselves, passing silently, with a terrible gulf protracting their boundary influences. But sometimes they pass so close, they feel what it is like to be each other, and they become entangled. Sometimes they dance. Sometimes they fuck, roped together and grinding in a fatal, final companion arc-- tidal forces awakening geothermic flows. Lava ice, lava cum-- geysers of it, spalling out into silver wedding rings, locked in a Cat's Cradle of gravitational lovemess.

But then what?

KAKONYM

Maybe evil is merely a lack of vision.

Just in case, I remain attentive, even vigilant when I can muster such a stance; I am the custodian of filthy visions in oil-stained cement floors, chemically altered halos, cigarette bonfires, dingy exterior stucco spattered with bleaching agents, particle board tangrams, gravel and pavemented parking lots, corrupted by weeds. I sit in the garage, unfocus my eyes, and wait for the next crest of the nightmare to swell. Emerge. Emerging. Arising from that spot where we are all blind as mole rats, where the cunning architecture of the eye is marred by the fished-through cabling of the optic nerve. This negative zone, this sulcus of sight, from which all abominations ook forth. They begin to enact their dharma in my vision like tutting, tearful pontiffs subtending a large masterwork painting, rising from the blotchy stains on the floor-- emerging echoes of The Battle of Alexander at Issus and Dynamism of a Soccer Player interfere with and chop one another up into a vortex of art-object debris. Several flies investigate and are caught up within the swirl of lightlike angular momentum-- all housed in a single plane, yet reaching out to me in cunningly wrought holography-- a waking dream before me. I hum a nothing tune, pretending to ignore its wiles. Maybe I don't want to watch this time. The obscene clanking uproar of a garbage truck shits down the street, dunking turd after turd of post-consumer offal into itself with its hookshot robot arm. The maelstrom teeters, threatens to divest itself from the world of vision. I'm starving myself, I think. I focus hard on the knife in my belly-- the autosurgery is well underway-- can't quit it without losing the patient. Doc, am I gonna make it? Don't bullshit me! Give it to me straight, Doc. Et cetera.

I snort and choke on faux gusts, sneezing up spores and dust. A heavy, earthen breath breaks out of my lungs-- cellar smells and earth-wet flavors of bedewed mushroom heads drooping in low grey light-- I've been colonized; a janitor-apostle peddling fungal apocrypha between vomit mop-ups. Maybe I should leap from my chair and run-- run through the tripwires set by spiders in the night, unbelievably long ones, silver lines cast in lucky breezes, flashing like razor edges against the mundane lozenges of American yards. Unspool the wires of the weed eaters... choke out the chumps wielding them... wipe out the gasoline tongues tanging the dirt; the phonemes of flies, the hapless cellphone convos yammering ceaselessly under business casual planes cruising the smug blue envelope of sky. It's a nice day to destroy. The wreckage in my chest smashes against itself, independent bergs of garbage floating on a violent saline-spittle sea. I still see the moth from this morning, the orange one, flapping on the floor, peppering the air with little orange scales, never gonna fly again, you. I'll leave you to your agony's long, slow attenuation.

She steps out of the art vortex, just like I knew she would. I'm ready I guess, bludgeoned into submission by all the rampant distraction. I've got my pen, ready to describe, and not much else. Not even a hangover. My eyes are plastic bags, lazily and inexpertly filled with Halloween candy. My penis and scrotum are afterthoughts, like bad lines jotted on the phonebook cover of my body. My chocolaty eyes grow huge at her shape, appearing, scissoring into the universe. Her lips are a copulating pair of pseudoplusia includens. Her chin and neck, forged in gradients of Nebuchadnezzar's electrum dream. Her splayed, encompassing arms are snaking towers constantly both falling apart and being rebuilt, with dark hairs like scaffolding. Her fingers are long, squawking hooked bills, each holding some kind of alien nut in its jealous, bifurcated grip. Her head is shaven close, with white stubble, and crowning her is a floating, black ziggurat, rotating in space like a 3-D model, casting aliased shadows that break on her brow. Her breasts are avocados that cut themselves open, revealing large pits and green-yellow fatty flesh, then reseal without seam their bumpy dark rinds, over and over, turning and twisting the skin of her chest with them, never following the line of any previous cut. Her nipples orbit roughly where they ought to be, bite-size black licorice. Her skull is a white truck barreling towards me at top speed-- total approach, never arriving. She is murderous to behold, but I don't flinch. It wouldn't do. Eyes like the strobing muzzle flashes of automatic weapons track me on whining gimbals; ears, hourglasses of red ferrous sand, shrieking about my time running out; her bulging belly a clear aquarium-- a charnel-pit of sundered fetal parts, sloshing side to side as her coquette pelvis churns within the dervish, and tipping, spilling splotches of sizzling amniotic fluid and baby blood onto the floor, each stain a snapshot of a vulture in flight, snatched up and animated by the whirling art-devil undulating before me.

She castigates me:

Ho, supplicant! I am called your condemnatrix by you who shall one day wring me defiant into the world-- I am your dying wish-- I have come from your death bed where you lay in misery, flopping in fevers. Not so much older, mind you. Nevertheless! My bottle you did rub rightly, and usher unto you now in this time I shall, your own judgment. You who have stolen every moment, such there are none left for anyone else. All down your gullet like a grandiose drain on the bottom of the world. All through your pretty fingers-- how like a woman's they are! How golden your tongue through your fingertips in its fullness of bloom. Only just twice, or perhaps four times, did you surpass yourself in words. But you fueled your desires with ill-gotten time. All these precious, stolen moments, and now they are gone. Wasted. Vanished. None left for the world or even for the prayers of children. I have come for my bride-price, pilgrim!

Her accusation roars like an airliner through the garage-- I am deafened. Grit swirls in whips through the air, cutting my eyes, my mouth, sanding my hair. Am I supposed to understand her meaning? She clips forward a step, revealing through the swarm tattered scarlet taffeta robes, fragments of dresses, slips, skirts, scarves, all rioting with the holographic chaff of the miasmic paintings twisting in the confused air. Her body is revealed more and more in its ostentatious lunacy. Two crescent moons of hips about to kiss.

"I really don't know if I can pull this off!" I protest. Every five seconds, one of the dull denizens of the house rattles through the door, stumping and snuffling around for loose tobacco, utterly oblivious to the scene taking place. I can see, as if for the first time, a certain truth. They are coccooned in television halos, like condoms made of garish commercial broadcasts. I almost envy them their ignorance now, more than ever. Me? I'm a naked larva, wriggling and hurt by both the real and by dreams. My genitals vanish completely inside my abdomen. She seems to notice this fact beneath my clothes, and she smirks. Her face does appear to have normal skin, but it's broken out in heat bumps. I peer at it intently, trying to puzzle out if some kind of message or clue to her admonishings are in there, steganographically encoded in her blemishes. Deviation from mean distance, from mean size-- maybe at least Fibonacci's sequence in the number in each cluster. She wrinkles her nose in disgust. She takes another step forward. It's only then that my concentration is shattered with the awareness that her lower half, borne up, sure enough, by four, bone-white-but-fading-to-brown legs, is that of a horse.

How does one respond to the invective of a horse goddess? The alkies are still milling through the tableau, trying to interrupt me with chit-chat about the heatwave of recent weeks. The centaurine entity appears not to notice them either-- are these the enemies of contemplation? Have I stolen all their moments? Is that how people disappear? How many people have I deleted, five minutes here, ten minutes there, escaping wherever I was at the time-- whatever I was supposed to be doing, in daydreams? Did I destroy the human race through my thievery? Ridiculous!

I'm not sure I can pull this one off. I'm always stuck between a bunch of pricker bushes and some certain death, like a white delivery truck speeding past. Sometimes I even sit in my car, just to steal more moments. I'm really not made for this. I wish I was made to fuck-- to be a real fucker, and now I have no dick. I want to feel my cum shoot like some large animal's, bruising the cervix, massive impact on each fertile moon, way up inside the warp tubes of some bony Empress, but now my balls are gone, lost somewhere in my fat body like vagabond anal beads. I'm vulgar. A libertine in a blue-collar straightjacket. A demonic force more in sobriety than liquored up. Manic. Mentally unsound. If I ever did a good thing, I swear I didn't mean it. I was never any good for longer than a couple weeks. Because I always wanted to be somewhere else, right? Is that what life is? Is life just a few moments of pure rapture, and the rest just made up of drudgery and sprinkled, stolen moments of pining to get back there? Is that why Paradise is such a success? Did I really send this Great Horsey Scarlet Harlot back through time with my own dying old-man wish? Is that how the pity party really ends?

Am I on to something? Am I pulling myself off?

SOLIPSE

Emblazoned with a four, a numeral made of knives, having one more than necessary, the coffin hums with motor vibration. Inside a cranium is being cleaned by suckling drapery; fringed arrays of tubular frills, siphoning away the meat from maxilla and zygomatic; from occipital and temporal, with the loving selection of delicate organisms filtering and feeding. It feeds on the flanks, the cheeks of the body. It feeds on the arms, the legs, the feet. It feeds on the face, and the cheeks on the face are the cheeks of the face, like the flanks are the cheeks of the body. Cheeks that would rise in a too-generous smile (never quite overcoming the eyes) are hollowed out, along with all the meat of the body, in time. In time, only the churning fist of maggots will be left unmolested by the sarcophagic machinery-- only larvae alone are fit to deal with the heart inside. Hidden, snuffling detectors meter the isolated decay, waiting for a specific molecular threshold to be reached inside the chamber, to sound the electronic bell. They have ordained a sulking moratorium then-- a known quantity of time, prescribed at the moment of death. What will happen when the bell tolls?

The room conspires to arrange a kind of wake for the body inside. The bed is drunk already. The curtains sweat and sob. The TV performs  a eulogy in Korean. The clutter on the dresser mills about in a stupor, searching for a face in the mirror. The mirror shows the shining flanks of a chestnut horse flickering across its width, knots twitching, long black switch of tail sweeping for flies. Whatever hills outside muster up an echo of a smile, like those devoured cheeks used to smile-- the skull has eclipsed them at last-- broken free of its cage. All the objects in the room quiver in the static mania of a death party, awaiting the arrival of the guest. At last, a final figure enters through the door. There was no knock. A discarded phone ringtones an organ fugue, and clop-clip go the figure's steps, until it stands in the middle of everything in the room. It reaches out from somewhere in its cookie-cutter angel silhouette, caresses the coffin with a black gloved hand. It traces the four of blades, curved and rigid and glistening with stoic enumeration. No dust collects. No spores plume in a slice of sun. The sun is low over the valley the hills squeezed together. Golden hairs protrude from the back of the figure's hand, through the glove, and chime with the ray the curtains allow through. A rough bag of skin hangs from below its belt, swaying and heavy with leaden mysteries coursing inside it.

The figure is not death, but a Groom for the body. The body, rotting, breaking, running, might be confused for a horse if it were seen. It could be ridden if the lid happened to fly open. It would rear up and whinny and flash in a bowling shock, sending the tenants of the room into panic. But the Groom is the one being ridden. The Groom is the one being ridden by an unseen rider filling the space between shade and shape like an overlaid skeleton. Like a glove of animated light. The groom traces the four with elongating claws. Spines pierce the silhouette like spears of stiff, laminated hairs, punching into the walls, knocking curios off the dresser, fracturing the mirror. The mirror shows a hundred horses, all a-dance in disarray. The Groom whirls, ragged, pushed and pulled by the anchored spikes. It is cast to every corner of the room in neck-breaking, whipping violence. The TV gasps, vomits static. The curtains fly open and the computerized buzzer caws with a carrion-bird's dry cackle, having snuffed its target scent. The phone jitters to the floor and tumbles onto its back. On its screen there is an image of a black flower blooming in night. A darkling bloom against a dark background. The room withers. The Groom is ejected through the window, still connected to the puppet spines, that drain out as it falls, twisting and thinning, like an inverted parachute. One by one the anchors fail, snatching chunks of wall and wood out the mouth of the window. There is no more sound.

The room recedes toward a vanishing point. The coffin remains shut. Like the epiglottis covers the trachea. Like the back of the throat, when a head swallows something down.

BEACON

Against a wall of yellow like sunlit wheat, neurosis cartwheels in jack tumbles, snatched up and spun time and again, larking in the likely lunar histories within each hour as it passes. It is a plucked strand, root and all; a shelled nut; a dried clove in the palm, kicked away by flicking fingers into molten sand to cook there and stink, even as thick, rainbow-shimmering black tar and asphalt clot and roll over the dunes-- even as the tough, lacerating grasses are pasted down with fossil mucus-- they too become the road, the holographic car-park.

Everything gets smeared underneath a dark horizon, the terminal sweeping-under-the-rug. Hands are dusted off and discarded spices and naphthene volatiles mingle in oozing perfumes of a dying, contrapunctal erogenesis with the lavender, roasting meat-- the people smells delivered by faint-hearted breezes from far away.

Divorced to life then, in non-memory; in blackout, it grows like a child of the skull, replete with nervous roots, probing the flaming, choked sands for water; replete with the skull's all-experience, and caving about, hidden and encrypted in a tar-slow dance of shorn-batwing hemorrhage. To ascertain it there, below, is to create it as an untruth. To breathe this seed into life again is to indulge in vicious fiction. Let it hang in earlier memory as an almost-star; a sun that, having the choice, chooses to die against the veil, staining its fabric with hydrogen light as it slumps to the bottom of gravity's bottle.

Wise one.

As soon as there is no sign of stopping within a thing, that thing itself is in its death throes. The worst thing possible-- to realize potential, triggers an acute stress response-- cutting, plucking, breaking hands with hammers-- pummeling a ribcage into submission-- insurance that the heart inside will not fuse; will not transmute iron into gold, least of all in its death.

How shall we then live?

It becomes necessary to manufacture idolatry from its precursors, in the furnace of the Cartesian burlesque, once the colding, deeping flows exsanguinate in the fullness of entropy.

Oh, would that Hedetet had taken up discarded, mammalian wings to match her innoculating, bejeweled breasts! Such a fine pair-- a dilemma-- a trilemma for self-exaltation in fondling-- for self-stinging-- the third leg between her legs, not a leg but the entire sojourn of women-- the ascending, pyramidal flightplan.

She casts about in late panic at blood she could not have lost, yet still lost-- not menstruation, but transpiration-- the roots of travel; temporal paradox shuttering alien realities.

Now she is a robed, trudging figure like so yawning many others, doomed to interlaced slices of possible worlds, possible selves; branches of acausal reality snarling and ensnaring and fickle.

Now a Baltic woman, married, with kerchief and brooches and shawl, digging with a wooden slat into a nest of wood ants and dumping the hole full of gasoline.

Now a molecular biologist, sabotaging the ATP cycle in the bodies of brown mice by day and retiring with a bottle of Shiraz and Thomas Friedman by night.

Now an Inuit grandmother and granddaughter both, rapidly fluttering, shifting with one another, flipping in indeterminable positions-- one in the snow, one carried by that one; one on the lap, one on the sealskin floor, providing the lap; one just beginning life, one at its end-- and both of them toothless and grinning in wrinkled, rank Love's whale oil light.

At last, covered in black and mute, she waits as all the babies of the desert attend their ears and moan as the scorpion responds, chittering, to the heartbeat of the world-- where is our goddess, they cry; where Inanna our protectrix; where might Nehushtan appear in the low sun of the valley, for we are envenomated by lies, colloidal with neurotoxic machines-- militarized by syringes full of little black fictions like little black books-- little black ink marks of pulverized ash and sheepfat-- the killing salve pumped into us by martyrs. Oh would that she who might have saved us all been able to reform her excised wings, not to have left us in this clandestine, final war with the ashamed and their material alacrity.

In this sweet time, the sweetness of nothing. The sweetness of not speaking, of not being spoken to, the sweetness of no foot on the stair, no clink of key or snarl of motor. Death is always rubbing her nipples against the ear of the poet, teasing in velvety silences a billion shades deep.

Death takes Hedetet in all her guises away, having been written out on the tongue of the dark road. The scorpion responds by becoming plush, stuffed, squeaky-- a toy tossed on a child's bed. The rise, turn, and rasp of happenstance, of clothing-- urinary reminders of the body; the smile of the stomach-- holes never empty and never filled-- a perfection state. No wants, except for the words to come close, but never arrive-- never unify with the murk of the real underground rivers from which all roots must drink; all stingers poison.

How self-satisfied.

How smirking is the poet.

That he becomes the savior goddess by pretending with words-- is only diminished by its reality; the reality of his transubstantiation. That he puts her away without a care, for later use maybe. It's as easy as jerking off to closed-eye visions. Cocks and tits and pussies, mouths and hands and fingers and asses, bat wings and historical garb-- all splattered with red honey, honey.

That's how Religion comes into the world-- by means of a nervous beacon, buried under the roadway, waiting for the signal to explode.

Always end everything with a lie.

Always.

SIDEREAL

The floor is sparsely littered with hairs, cut or plucked-- the silver ones stand out against the dark background of the rough stone. Some surface charge coils them into whorls-- cochlear convolutions glinting in moonlight channelled in through slick, dewy fossae-- shafts for slow, seeping exchange with the distant out and up. Beetles on their backs rasp the air, gently adding their precious moisture to the hot, swollen tick of atmosphere buried like a yolk under a mountain of egg-bleached rock-- the lens of ablutions; kettles cut from the stone floor, linked by channels; cold, waiting baths, condensing, condensing. The beetles are boats too, cartoon backstrokes striking little V's onto the scriptural surface of each pool, until vector becomes noise. We let them clamber against the droplets they find-- the dry ones we crush out like cigarettes, our filthy toes too tough for their broken bodies to cut.

Our own flailing, against each other; against ourselves, might be the final spasms of our dreams, drying out in shock, one more time. This might be the end of passion, this passion. Why else the finishing brushstrokes of butchery, slathered like vandal dye on marble perfection? Why the patina on new copper? From whence did our ancience peel itself raw and rabid? We are so much worse in our sobriety-- leering horrors, woman and man, drunk with fatal purpose-- chapter by chapter conceiving and birthing an eternally disrobing harlot; frills and gills and hearts and cords, gristle and raw anatomy, stomach contents and jawbone marrow-- a goosey gore pile; a fetid baby, stinking with the gum chomp of ultimate time, ultimate space.

Night, the ultimate magus-- cleric of the beastchurch we mime and shadow with our bodies and senses, with our autonomic recitations and dusky homeostases. We are lapping the link in a recursion-- a figure 8 of flesh, joined at the fingers, infusion through the crotch-- a disembodied clitoral structure flexing like a cosmic string, but always, always bloody. Blooded in the teeth. Blooded through spongiform viscera. Blooded in enforced, gnashing transfusion, membranes weeping into one another like murder sheets, leaking and pouring into billions of waiting, cellular mouths-- both of us bitten by God and unable to cure his hemorrhagic piss infection-- we filter it through our bodies in symbiostasis, shrieking chelation.

Smoke chugs from my belly. My meat sizzles as you blow the fire bright. You've brought sweetgrass, milkweed, yarrow, datura, animal fats. Your cut hair is clumped and matted with these in a torched nest as you nurse at my groin, sleeping and suckling. My fats ignite and hollow out my chest. Black flame tongues penetrate from my mouth and eyes. My body dissolves like a whale on the shore. The beetles etch verses in the collecting soot. It's not our place to give them as recitation in this holiest of caves, we being anatheme to deliverance, to revelation; we are no dictating angels.

PSYCHOACCESSION

Prisoner, test the bonds. Alchemist, test the bonds.

I am linking into your skull view. The surroundings, the landscape, hurt your skull in ways I feel. Your skull is unprotected by your flesh. I watch you smile and your skull smiles through, louder than you are. I watch the radiation blow through your skull like it isn't there. Like birds through trees. I watch your death unfold like a peony of heavy lead. A walkside head, hanged, under a limp sky trying to thunder, pregnant with lipids. Your skull is a glass house for my scrying. Your mouth a curved field of haptic control. I hack my way in, curious day and night, co-opting your piloting. I can see all around you in a kind of wasp vision. Everything is blue or red-shifted. There are only a few colors time machines know how to display. Blue veins or red veins, approach or recession; hyper, hypo-- black, brown, blue, red-- till white. A dog's mouth.

A dog's body, rotting there. You sneer at the fetid, brute wreck on the shore of your spiced air. Spiced dust rotting into your skull, through your glass nostrils. Test the bonds. A little grey cat hides in shadow under blue plastered stone stairs. A busy street with lots of idle men. You don't notice him today, but I do. You notice him tomorrow, when I'm asleep inside you, elsewhere in your body.

Your brows are funiculate awnings for the shops of sight. Commerce is raping your skull. You must cut the bonds against the sharpness of your brow. Do it when you clear the sweat from your face. You must see with your skull. This is my prophecy: Decomposition produces alcohol. Al. Co. Hol. A dog's body decomposing in partial ash. Half burned by shrieking children with knives. Its tongue is cut out. Babies crawl on glass, green, brown, blue, and smoked. The sharp sine whistle of polymer chains shriek suppertime under canopy; under billow, under sock and flag and flap. Test the bonds. Pull the cord tighter. Make me shudder. Make me cry. Watch my death unfold like a wasp in a pitcher plant. Your inner walls slick and sickly sweet. I keep smashing up and inside, choking you deeper.

I'm bigger now. Big as clouds. Your skull is a beacon I'm leaving behind. Sorcery is impermanence. It is acting within-as-if. You weren't watching the clouds. You weren't on your back long enough for them to show you. They blow ten ways at once, up here. Ten winds, I attend to their tillage like a rural estate. Permanent decline; exquisite declension. We ferment the tropopause like the rind on a dead dog's eyeball. We are the thrush and pink eye of warming syrup night prayers, doves gushing from robes in prickle heat, flash fire, flash flood, flash of genitals, now wide owl-eyed-- a lone "courrucou!" as dove becomes owl in scattered stovepipe trees, scattered legs, fly, fly! Wither the mental; wither the body, sail solar in the phallic boughs of blooded sight-- the skull's globe becomes cerulean, becomes gloved and gowned, planetary, and shatters into wings. Watch our death unfold as the cyclones proselytize the mountains. Test the bounds, the bonds, the binding!

None of the evidence of our deaths will survive. No bodies-- we carry our bodies away from our lovecrimes, accomplices of unwavering loyalty. Your skull is carrying your body through another cyclonic animation-- nested chains of tasks, terminal larvae. Root, tuber, tap, tumor, hive-- the skull feeds the heart its dramatized infection through a rubber chain, hollow in the middle. Terminal proboscis of genital inversion. I fade back into your fat; pack your skin like a roasting duck-- invader, warm and drooling, tossing in honeyed lymph dreams-- I fade back in to your bones and compile my findings. I look down at my hands during my report-- my ring finger is crooked like yours.

BOUSTROPHE

I read the spread palms of the oaks that will outlast me, summer beyond summer. Golden light strikes through emerald type, eliminating it from the transcription of the day, and I feel someone curl alive, ice cold, through some hidden vent, just behind my shoulder. Ice cold and blowing blue into my veins. I feel the spear of my Fall impale my body in this smothered annum-- precursor and kiss-promise of a sap-sweet decline into glacial pools-- the mutual erosion of love and the loved.

Do I bear down and prosecute each difficult moment, full of the blinds and traps of each mewling dullard's obtuse insistences, or should I continue my inversion-- I'll continue Castaneda's fraud-- let the gleaming dog have my arm, then-- frothed mouth of bloody black gums drags me to the places I scattered the bones of my tensegrity harem, lovers true and faithful. "Look. See what you've done. Remember." He glares at me, Dog-Judge. For this I will hang by my neck from strange eclipses, strange crescents, strange gravitational pins-- an executioner troupe of moon-mothers, sickles sharpened by starlight; encandled by grim butchery I'll light their way through the desert. "An it harm none..." Oh but harm me. Harm me so completely, such that nothing remains but some little smoke and ash.

The traitor flips the script on you so quick-- just there, off the road, a pathway into dark-body bushes, where everything cleaves at once to good and evil-- the step off the ledge into ruin; the tires spinning off the crumbling cliff; inertial invective of scorched corpse malignance-- impact-- mudsplash spraying the features of the Enemy, leering in window-mirror reverse-- to wake up from this dream of life and face the Judgment of the Lord, oh woe and calamity, such remorse-- imagine it with me-- such remorse but too, too late. How trivial it is to imagine, after all, don't you think? Everyone always gets what they deserve in the end. Except, they don't.

I'm a spectre, unwelcome in the world in which you exist. One of us should not be here. One of us is wrong-- unnatural. Notice the endless procession of, again, traplike fiends in the shape of persons you know-- have known forever; automata. Machine code, being followed on the tape, backwards and forwards, always. Always playing for attention-- see? See? Dragged along by black dogs and white dogs and forced to howl in unison. This is the only really dangerous thing out there. The rest is just being unlucky, or not. Fatal, terminal, or not.

I'm lonely. I miss you. I miss me.

SPORES

Worms have eaten through me. There are holes in my culture of emotion, where entire polities of burgeoning life have been redacted. They left tunnels for ghost trains, bound together, forming twisted cabling-- they invented a braided kind of self-erasure to strangle me at night, sucking away my vision. It goes somewhere. Where? Are you having my dream now that it was just getting good? Won't you tell me what happens next? I'm soft. I've become gentle, slumped against the chaos gate, with no memory. All I can hear is the muffled thump of Dionysus' darts as he buries them in my picture on the other side of the door.

Long black braids loll out of my empty eye sockets like snake tongues. They lick each other, just out of reach of my tongue. Their ends unravel and re-knit, forming a chain in front of my mouth, blunting my whimpers; catching my tongue in clever eyelets and binding it in vicious ligatures of wound strands. Sometimes the braided tongues of hair force their way into my mouth, down my trachea, into my lungs, branching into my alveoli, disintegrating into their nanobe components-- billions of black crosses, infiltrating my blood like asbestos snow. I rupture from the inside, on the cellular level; bleed cytoplasmic tears as my mitochondria begins its sad diaspora.

My skin produces the brown fungal gel again. You shave it off with your knife. You are not careful. Underneath is a ragged blush. Red on freckle-white, like black on brown-- junta uniform palette for another African coup. You open my chest like a curio cupboard and take what you want. I am hidden nowhere and can never be found. Am I inside the collectible sets of glass angels with their pewter swords, with their cadmium hearts and eyes? Didn't you hear me? I said I am hidden nowhere, and can never be found. You trowel my mycotoxin mud for your masonry, paving a road with silicate bricks-- a bridge to Andalusia. I might go with you, most of the way.

In the midnight of summer, the infant june bugs are late for iftar. They scrabble like drunken mountaineers in the dark I fucked them over with. Their false moon, snuffed out. Temporary nerve lumps in temporary chitin, they will grow huge in the heat tomorrow. They will chew into the tunnels in my back and slowly replace my kidneys with buzzing, useless wings. Lucky I am so used to being reborn-- this time as a crosseyed godlet with a big gold rail spike, ready to hammer home the doctrinal moratorium on the gnostic's cream dream.

They are crawling on me now, in my shirt pockets. They hide in the chaos of my skin. They try to turn me brown-- a big brown X marks the spot for the black hammer of the sky to thunder down and rupture like I rupture their bodies with my shoes. I'm such a gentle killer. Look how I let them flood my shoes. Little machines, finding their purpose as a surrogate goodness in my redacted sections. Bland little Rommels, going most of the way, just to die in the desert.