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.