Like A Prayer

I know that I am wicked, the way my
fingers curl into you. The way the
hunger hardens into an edge.  The
way the red flesh parts to the core.

I think of the blood that will slick
my lips, I think of christ in the garden
fingering an apple. The gasp of cyanide.
Waiting for your hands to hold me
under the tide line of your hips. 
My mouth follows the maps of your
femoral arteries. Tell me the words
I am too close to see.
It is a season of ragged extremes
where thoughts are heresy and vulgar desire
trespasses against immaculate flesh.
The golden death rippling.
After a skin grows over the moment
and the air is scrubbed of oxygen.
I am ripe for redemption.  Licked clean
as a razor blade.




.

I want to wake up in the hands of the ocean
a child of a new medium,
salty kisses to wash away the sand
that has settled  into my windward corners.
the sharpness of cactus
and tumbleweeds
replaced with the slippery  green
of seaweed
 
let me feel the pull and release of the moon
as she plays with the water.
 
instead of the dirt devils driving
me to shelter  with their shrieking
curses through windows and bones
give me the siren’s song and its reasons
to seek a new destruction

.

It is Saturday morning, so why
not fall in love, letting the grass
blades bend into my back
while the blue gathers in the sky.
It’s a lie. I am in bed
and the sky is probably already white
with heat. It is August and your
eyes are blue until I see them again.

.

Polyester gods smooth 
into crevices.  It is a sin the
way it creeps, the humidity
darkening into desire. 
This atmosphere is picked clean.
I want more than the ache
of continued existence, my hands
are too close to your heart. 
But never crossing.  Already
the air between us is thin. 
Do you feel slighted?   
An indifferent crucifixion
suffocates, eyes averted. 
You linger in dilation, 
will your eyes turn white
when there is no blood? 
There is always blood. 
I lick my fingers clean
because they know
their way home.

.

there is a thinness to the light,
a madness that dreams cling to
silent among the whispers of flowers




.

My knees have graved
deep the upended belly
of the dirt.  There are empty
parts that can not be filled.
You are not a puzzle piece
but I will make it up to you
under the dead sky.

Hold me until I can
see you.  Whet your knives
on these long bones.
I don’t mind your lies as long
as I can taste the blood
of your mouth and parse
the oleander hidden deep
in the velvet of your gown.

If you walk backwards
sweeping a branch you can
erase the drag marks. If you
have access to divine
intervention and a cup
you can raise a toast.

It bothers you that
you can not see yourself
in me; I have turned loose
the fauna of my heart.
Goat-skinned and salt bound
I am rooted in the soft hand
of nightshade.  The ghost’s
still lick the rime from my crown.
The gold will not polish
into mirrors no matter
whose tongue whispers.

This blood we call home,
the thorns impaling, the harrowing
abandonment. The words
ring until hollow or hallowed.
I have tied the veins and worn
the rings but spines harden
and beauty is only a fraudulent
strength. I will forget as fast as I can.

.

Where is the blood the sky holds;
the papery wind that refuses ink.

What angels will the river find when it is lost?

I wear wings now, but I remember
the night of your hair, the moon
color of my fingers.

The gold is deliberate.

.

I want the blue flowers pinched from the root,
the proximity of your fingers to the
honesty of death, press them to my eyes
an offering of sky with the heaviness of water,
a blood to stain your innocence.

I want to know desire is not a false god

.

with a bottle of whiskey
and a rattle snake
I am ready to face
the sun
obliterating the dawn
into another blue sky.
I slide into my coat of crows
and fill my pockets with sand
so the past will always weigh on me.
Since I vacated immortality
or maybe I was evicted
the stigmata doesn’t itch and
the future isn’t so imperative.
But I still walk this land where the clouds
are too distant to even be a promise and the jack
rabbit steals what shade there is.

Night will come bringing dreams
of the memory of rain
of the ocean that was ours
of the salvation I lost.

.

I grip the silence of the knife,
a gasp of iron coercing a whisper
to blood born absent
of small meanings and an edge
too fine lost in your eyes

.

Honeysuckle spills from
the rock walls, the single drop
of nectar waiting. Cicada skins
pause on tree trunks.

I want to implicate you
in my life. If anybody 
checked, they would find
my fingerprints on the
abandoned petals but
your lip prints would be
on the spent stamens.



.

Your lips sell arson,
fanning flames
a wild fire raging along
a topography of senses.
Bottle rocket sparks in the
flickering grass of a drought
blasted heart.
 
I drink the molotov cocktail
of your hair flowing
through fingers like midnight,
a dark dream engulfing me in a
black blaze.
 
I am incendiary and ready,
a sacrifice for your inferno.

.

words die with little sparks,
only in the infinite death
will I see you for a bare second

.

You are at any moment what you are thinking at
that moment. Your I is both subject and object;
it predicates things of itself and is the things
predicated. The thinker is the thought, the knower
is what is known, the possessor is the things
possessed. 
              —Jack London, John Barleycorn

I wait beside each breath, there
is a chance I could believe
it later. The small ripple of water
lost is the cruelest kiss.
It is an arid belief wanting flowers
to bloom when the seeds have fled
in the frantic misery of the wind.

To grasp flesh as a breath, a dying
man propped on a pillow of hope.
It is pleasure dug deep in the
wounded red night, scissors well oiled,
a parting death to slip into. Can you
read the number on me?

The egrets rise like flags
of surrender, hands hastily
thrown up and shot. Yet I still
pray to you. The subordination
of the stone to the pond.



.

I’ll take wine if that is the only trick
you know, I was hoping for a shortcut.

I’ll take your bird-like hands, there is a nest
in me, a bramble piercing any sky.

Maybe I’ll turn and run, boundless, a blue god.
Maybe you already did. Maybe the rose petals are clues.

The glint of the sun snags my eye, then
the brick hits me. Another ocean falling out,
another crucifix baited.

I wanna lick your rusty fingers.

I am a gun digging for gold.
I am a bird dreaming of cathedrals.
I am a veil of water tired of living.

I proclaim myself holy.

There was a time when I could hum and
your blood would call me home.




.

We are hidden in

the missing light,
a dark recess.  Blind,
we are animals
of taste and touch. 
The air is slick with
scent and the whirring
guttural voices of beasts. 
Until the thinnest blade
of light cuts into us,
we are immaculate 
in the suns vivisection. 
The golden truth of
bodies lost in another’s

.

wellspring

I am no longer vacant,
emptiness has fled as I lie
here teeming with more
life than any day before.
Are your hands soft? 
Will you rest them on me? 
Each finger a bullet, a feather’s
breath of lead to pierce my heart. 
You may keep what you find.

Tattooed and painless the story
is writ proudly, my belly is wine dark
and seeping.  Shadows crawl in veins
no longer silent, encompassing hands
that have released their misery.

Scatter seeds amongst
the writhing mass, 
spontaneous generation will
yield a swarm. Flies or flowers,
either will join me as the food of gods.



.

Tell me again
how the water slides
like a snake, tell me how
the bones of your fingers
seethe with thirst,
the emptiness of need
that fills your
milk soft skin.

The embers have
caught in your eyes,
the cup of your mouth
fills with a hungry wild fire.
 
Your heart is throbbing,
your blood is rampant,
capillaries dilating, flushed
with cravings of release.

Make me your first casualty.

.

Have you memorized
the flow of the incidental
music, it is subsonic but
the water gets it like a
cloud bursting. It is the
anticipation of a first touch,
a tongue tasting the distance
across the terminals of a battery,
the frequency response of electrons
jumping between bodies.
The briefest creation of
mythologies, the moment
when gods are born.
There is a hymn
I’ll whisper into the
space of a breath
if you’ll raise your lips.

.