I do not want my mother's love or
the way she hangs her secrets 'round my neck
I do not want my mother's love or
her words that sink as stones in the gut
I do not want my mother's love or
the screaming that breaks my ears
I do not want my mother's love or
the scorching of her gaze on my flesh
I do not want my mother's love or
her awful grip on my child sized arms
I do not want my mother's love or
the unfair guilt she tries to drown me in
I do not want my mother's love or
the pain she caused that made me hurt myself

I do not want my mother
I do not need my mother

For when I wanted my mother
and when I needed my mother

She did not want me.

Blanketed the body, as
beneath a veil
Exhumed by smoke, the
ashes of ashes, the
hair weighed down with anchors at
the ends of them. Seated an
empty table at the chest, heavy in a
burdened solitude, kiss it in the night time
when the moon turns its back to you. Was
pockets with deep holes, patched at the
knees with a painful thread, kicking
at old dust until it assaults the eyes.
I have not died yet, but live also as
undead, once dead, and now undoing,
fluttering from grave to garden like a
doomed butterfly, weakening but still trying
to bloom

Collapsed in the lungs
--------Again
Was a fuck up, maybe once more
--------Failed

Gaze was a glaring gun

Felt a new hole in the
heart in the brain
practicing my aim but I only pile
words in the corners like a swept mess

And maybe there is a window in the room but
this too is fractured, my hands get splintered
in the sunsets, but I can kick at the glass,
leave like a billowing smoke, slithering
into the sky like a frightened snake
with a body wound

Brushed breaths blinking against
the starlight soft stormed the wide
strokes at midnight dark blue a
bird with wings like clouds sailed the
sea ship into the breast dented like
flesh at the sternum thick and beating
as alive as a city stammering into the dark
night flashing like a candle and the
walls are cantaloupe orange and the
house is a cage where the home tries to live
the body as soft pressed flowers in a book
seep the skin a book spine but dusty old still
fresh with a forest new thought as bright in
the brain as a sun flare photograph in staple
smiles a month in the park leased a stutter
click the bone new shoes shiny as tap dance
sipping the garden in a grass green cup
touching golden in the ribs smelt a loud
happening heard it grow larger larger larger
in the mountain unsung

Rigor mortis

The heart is the tallest in the
body, exceeds the bones and roams
beyond the pasture of the skin and

the throat is a pit with hot coals burning,
steams the tongue while talking and still
tastes familial fume

The hands are the eyes of the arms and
they are sometimes unseeing, sometimes
tensing with a premature demise or
bended at the knuckles like a crashing grave

Part and curtained, to pass through the
ruins of unliving, undoing like a bloomed bud
falling back into the husk of itself,

scabbing like the bare parcels of earth,
scorched as if discomforted by an all-
engulfing flame, the land is scarred and

defected with wounds upon wounds with
blood that even bleeds, with bruise that
continues to blemish in a cursed stirring

Rigor mortis and the eyes that lie behind the
eyes, rigor mortis and the veins that burrow
above and away from the skin, rigor mortis
and the mind that is entombed in a century of dying

Rigor mortis and existing
both alive and deceased

make it stop, the
endless tunnel i
travel within, i can
see the end and it
looks like a noose
hanging, i am forsaken
as i forsake and i cannot
be free, but still i am
terrified of this destiny

silent savior, stained with nail on
hallowed wood but
still as a stagnant pool
here I wait at Bethesda to bathe but am
nonetheless diseased, no stirring wave,
no soundless grace, just the sin of a
stone-hearted god, just the bitter tears
of thwarted beggars

I still write letters for the
words I cannot mumble, as if my mouth were
taped and my tongue cut with paper. A cadaver
in a car, caught myself hung with a
leather belt, seat back and hoarse and
holding a knife in the mind, tracing a
gash in the neck with a crooked finger and I
still tremble in the streetlight, swallowed the
shards of teeth shattered on an asphalt grave
but these affairs cloak the intellect like gauze for a
damaged brain, I am faulty wiring and a
house on fire, boiling wood of humid fever,
white like bloodless death. I still echo in an
ivory tree, face down and clotted and drowned
in a dream, I still fade as if inhaled by the
winds and I am only diminishing

Everyday is a
death of many deaths
Everyday I wake to a
dream of a dream of another life
Every life is a confrontation of value and
I wonder my worth against the granulated
pixels of reality

2 glasses of water, a
plastic bag beneath the seat, a
fork I use and then discard and
I am still alone in the eyes, a
dead-weighted hearse heart-
heavy as a tire and diseased as a
rusty car I am a fire in a trash can burning
garbage to ashes and then I am none just
smoke that smothers those I pillar against

Fissure by the breast, snap the
sternum and rented ribs, mausoleum in the
mouth I can only speak of unliving, like I
move in constant backwards motions, ripples
reversing inward until they condense to a
drop and vanish up in the air, and like this too
I am vanishing, dissolving into space like the
crumbs of a once lighted star, except there is
no explosion, no beauty, no rage of flame and
splendor, just a void into which I
recede and become nonexisting