A thing in perpetual stomach: seen only before
torn. I cannot communicate that I would
not do this violence; to pry the clasp
of my jaw, gums bleeding out of sleep,
pull past teeth, kick the larynx, thrash
music out the glottis and gulp hot
snot all the way down. Were I to wash
with water, little pill, you’d hang one-nailed,
shiver-nosed above the acid, slip through
an ulcer, faster, gone south, chew the bladder
or fly high, babywhisker, boot the gray
heart aside, scrape your initials, your year
and twenty twenty five. They will not paint
over this for some time. Tumble down a lung
and bum phlegm, ash, asthma, smoke scar
and seizure one-eighty beats per minute.
No, I know you’d smell the moth on swallow, that
defective thing, grasp it and swing through skin,
lope gutty back through grass and my eyes’d
migrate to the sides, joints’d shrink their seams, the
dream of that gash healing, somehow clean.
