Already Dead
As empty hills, keel and slip inside the Earth,
Again swallowing its breasts and cunts and cocks,
A rooster, red and beakless, feckless, blind,
Stumbles in the yard.

And I, a tuneless savant, your instrument,
Parked in an allotment on a busy street,
Retching for farthings and second-hand graces,
Savage the legs of strangers, hoping to taste love.

And I, too, expunge excrement: sheets of erring thoughts,
And the sun, a stave, refracts through glass and fabric
Upon a room, bitter cold, years-spared the light,
Providing little to satisfy my hunger.

And I, unaroused – my dick, an amputated leg –
Find light merely titillates with too real despair.
And I know the door to my mother’s house
Is locked.

And I am aware of my death.

Already dead, and forgotten,

already

dead.

Fresh Flowers
Vulgar though it may seem,
A collapsed jaunt,
Of obscene lucidity,
It is a fact that only we know
How our wet and clammy legs,
As they slide then lock
Before the threnody,
Are as gentle and sweet
As a field of lilies in bloom.

The Morning Mist
Her thin tendrils, barely fit to hold her up,
Shook under the weight of her giving,
Cleaved and open, decorated
By the inky hand of other women,
They showed the feasting of death on life,
And life on the sin of ceaseless wanting,
Wanting – right now – that is expressed
In my placing my hands upon her calves,
But which is also a hunger that grows
The more we fill ourselves,

So I grip her sharp frame,
I wrap one arm around her,
And she speaks to the heart of you.
And you want – to snap – to snap her,
She who is hard,
But also brittle like a twig.
And then she is gone,
And so too am I,
In the frugal morning mist.