The skin of longing
1.
I dream. I can channel
the dying get out, get out, I say. When I wake I forget the names of days. Each day I call hungry. The weeks lose their boundaries. Everythingmerges. Falling the sensation of and flinch like a stutter. Every day when I walk past the hospital my eyes run. I can’t stop them.
2.
Close to the surface
the body is water. Protect your loved ones. The body is fluids. Dry hands are safe hands. Snot sparkles yellow globules on the bus window. The smell of urine will hang on for days. The paper will dispense one thin square at a time. The toilet will flush itself.
3.
Used condoms
decorate the town- belt, a spill of seed across daisies. To leave your outline press firm into the warm earth. Looking for rakish I found his pubic hair in my dictionary pressed to recall a whiskey question mark, curved as a phallos bird.
4.
Sanguine. Heat
sucks at the marrow a glut of phlegm. The bed a rut I lie in. Light spasms. When the fever wears me, my sweat beads along the hem. It is a scratchy fabric. When night comes we air our secrets. We show each other our scars.
5.
Each to their own
skin of longing. Open up Open up and let me in. There are guards you say, all along my borders and they are armed but you know how to bribe them. I want to know who owns the fish that swim in my shadow?
6.
I hold. The past
clenched in me and on. Lurking you call it. When I unscrew my head sadness swarms fruitflies in your face. Blue at the edge and it spreads dark to the soft middle. You won’t believe the things words have done to me. Until I show you the lines like gill slits along arteries, main. He always wrote like that, I say in upper case.
7.
Each to their own
boundaries. I reach and reach and nothing. The nights are anaemic. You can lick my tears but it doesn’t make you crying. Please stop you say and I realise I have been banging all this time against walls that will not fall. It’s nobody’s fault you tell me down the line, your voice like a pulse in me. But perhaps it is mine. The fault. I am always there you say. And if I knew where there was I would find you.
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