Saturday, January 8, 2011

A Painting


The manner erotic, the content savage:

death as functional as hard, black blood;

ideas, the tines of sharpened teeth

ridged along the dry broken jaw,

wielded with the broken rhythm of warning,

rhyming with human emotions never expressed,

turned mechanism as they encounter flesh.

No murder, she thinks, in self defense,

no sanctity in dying for what you have,

conceived as if in some forgotten life,

the rushed act vicious and reciprocal

as the father once his trembling kill embraced.

Her stone heels crush the wolf’s skull.

She clutches the bitch’s cub on her hip;

the organs in its belly churn and moan.


Her double sleeps nude in a hayfield,

dreams only echoes of spoken images.

The noonday sun has bleached her body.

New blood clashes with the white flower

she clutches like a palpable madness—

paranoia reconciled with satisfaction.

Men cross the reaped fields like clouds.

Sly grin a facial scar, eye

a mask, the fox, with delicate paw prods

her breastbone to further impersonal hunger.

His tapeworm nestles in her rigid belly.


The innocent shivers, pointed to pluck—

act as fruit; sibilant utterances

convolve a desire for color like a gravity,

a dream of odor, a lust for god. Words.

The medium is flesh, her flesh, and his

desire. She does not desire his flesh.

Hidden eyes spy upon them, winking,

blue-hearted, otiose flowers whose own

languid adulteries are with the brief bee.

Her keening awakens her clockwork cock,

who’s all but forgotten to exist since she

left his island of sand to wander the mist.

His senses agitated by her loud exit

into absolute intensity left for him

as a maelstrom between her parted lips,

he speaks to her, cramming knuckles

in his dry mouth, about the end of silence:

Your aching . . . your violent . . . your body.