One kiss One

When you're in me, the end has already passed.
The afterlife is the time of you-in-me.
The moment of invitation is impossible to remember, but I'm sure it occurs, every and each time. I'm sure it's not an invasion, not you breaking into me, not you entering me against my own desire.
I do know, that while we speak, or eat, or read together, and should you lean to me, to kiss me - as you've done in every season of the year, in every hour of the world's time - I am not, at that moment, receiving you. I'm not open. And then, perhaps, the kiss will linger. Our kiss. And become not a kiss among equals but an eruption of force, a weather change, the moment just before the setting out on a hike into snow and night and the need for fire. And I will linger there, I will linger there, feeling the departure into this impending chaos, and as I clutch you, squeeze your strong back, knead your shoulderblades, trace your beard with my palm - I am hanging on to you, to remain where we are, and to not be sent out on the road again. Clutching to the road itself - you. Embracing the weather itself - you. Demanding the world turn into the wind of space without me.
And a chaos of letters, a kind of typographic earthquake occurs.
And then I'm drawing you in me, pulling you in, watching your cock as it drives and retreats feeling it in someplace like a neck that's behind my heart. I watch your chest. I watch the vein in your forehead thicken and vanish and rise again. I close my eyes and the movement of you in me becomes a rhythm that people begin to speak in, people that walk through me as I feel you. They talk to one another, following the rhythm of your cock's rhythm. In a way the entire watery air they move in pulses with your drive. I see excitement build in their faces, an excitement of children, almost, who've heard of something coming that is too fantastic to believe, and that has been wanted since they can remember want. The arrival of childlike thrill distorts these adults' (always adults) faces into a kind of whorling of teeth and lips and bright ignited eyes that run like lava. Static starts to fall from the sky, from the antenna of your cock, probably. I feel my lips trying to chew you into me and hold you there, at the same time throwing you out to pull you in harder. And then, something turns, again. And I take you like a hammer in my hands and make another attempt at demolishing myself, with you. Try to pulverize the stone of my body into a dust that aches. Pound. Hit and pound and hit. A redline of searing heat like a hot needle in my neck, and then my belly shearing open into an eyesocket of light and blood and my teeth growing longer by inches, the people who've arrived all've gone now, there's no one now, now. And from behind where they are not I hear your throat start to tear into scrap, into metal, metal shard being driven into dirt. You blaze a kind of backwards heat and I hear it strike my starless dark mind. Break Me I hear myself say, after. Break Me. Over and over again hearing it. Break Me Break Me Break Me Break Me Break Me
Uncoupling like dogs I feel us on the other side again, the kiss among equals signs our return.
You wear that ring on your finger, as I do. And inside that, in it, through it, through its empty hoop, we pass back and forth, through these worlds, worlds that constantly end.

Triangle Shirt Waist

In the last picture taken of her, she had her bottoms off. It's black and white, where it was once bent a line cuts across it making the emulsion crack, making a kind of syntactic space between the top of her left thigh and her left hip and pubic hair. The line makes a frame in the frame, makes a second silent enclosure in the long ago silent captured light. She's not looking at the camera, which is to her left; she's been facing it, but has turned now, so her torso is turned away, but her legs are not yet followed. A sheer scrap of silk or nylon scarf is draped over her left shoulder and breast; her dark hair is cut short. Her profile's gaze is a glimpse of a gaze between expressions, like the smile or pose she's just dropped hasn't been followed by whatever was to be next, the next pose or next word, since she may be speaking; it's a face that has fallen between looks, and so looks loose and almost nonhuman; because the eyes and lips and opening of the jaw and turning of the head all seem out of synch, parts of disparate expressions but not adding up to a whole face, coherent and meaning. It is this ugliness, this expansive disintegrated shattering face that assures me she was beautiful. Not at all fat, she has the thickness of flesh that was well thought of in the days before color. A rump firm large and lovable. Breasts maybe a little small for her rump, but larger than mine and lovely. The meat around her waist like banquet roast, like a quilt to roll in, a refuge, a land. Who took this? The same who wrote, on the back, taken the day before she died in a dip pen and black ink that's faded to a kind of blue? Behind her a castiron lampstand with a candelabra atop it, and to her left, just at the right frame edge, the footend of a sleighbed, sheet and blanket unmade.
In her figure and skincolor, her breasts and ass, the line of cracked light that traverses her pussy, in the way her face will never resolve into an expression that is stable or human ... in the mystery of who was taking her, watching her, and who chose to take this moment, the one usually turned away from, the moment between ... and in needing to believe it was not she, herself, who traced the inscription on the back, dipping the pen in ink, blotting it, creating a tale of the death of her own image, but in not being able to believe otherwise ... and in that she clearly was working, as I had ... A simple thing, finding a photograph on the ground near an apartment building's garbage cans, where one has clearly just been emptied, by death, no doubt ... a simple thing become this terrible thing, this having found a still from a silent movie of my own insides acted by a woman I'll never get to ... know ... thank ... protect ... or love.

You've gone now. I like how you keep dripping out of me, even a couple hours since you came. I like it more when you're not here than when you are. How it makes the house more quiet and still, the light a comfort and a reminder of time moving on. It makes being here a kind of oration, a sermon eloquent of a power that can never ebb, never catch its breath, never pause. It would throw me off the cliff and continue on. Sitting here, feeling your sperm runnel out of me. My hands warm.

Capital News

In a blind, I was looking up at the greyed wood throne where the interchangeable kings sit, up there in the tree, to shoot passersby in their heads, the ones enjoying the path. I'd never seen one up there. During the sacred days their weapons echo off the icegrey wall of the sky, and the sound of bodies falling into fresh snow is a kind of shushing, quieting the echo that fell them. Silence listened in on us as we hid. Because we had to hide. The snow mute blast, the shushing fall. Never a voice.
Pull a thick rope down from the trap attic door of the sky, a thick rope made of warm brown shit. Knotted in places, to assist climbing. Steaming rope of crap, in the snowcold air. Guaranteed not to tear in half, a hand will make an impression in it, making climbholds easier. Who told you your studio was up there? Who told you? Go on. You'll find what's what when you shove your head up through its hole. The view grows more breathtaking as the climb continues. The interchangeable kings in their grey twobyfour thrones falling away, high up in their trees, the flashing of their muzzles now like occasional stars in the polluted night. The globe a screen with the sound off.

When I wanted to turn to you is when I decided to leave.

They'd like to call this a dream. I understand. I would too. But if it was, they wouldn't have cared in the first place.

Swayback

The untenable sickness to be human, in celebration and celebrity calendar driven, outside the stream of my own house’s strain, in the middle of a country in its later years, seeing the place I used to call home – the television screen – announce the turning of the year. In and amongst another clan’s cave, another selfsuspending timeleaping wave of human violence and confusion and craving for peace, a craving so strong it would make murder a quiet lake to sit by, finally, and rest. And wish someone would know, the very one it needed to vanquish, the very one that owned the lake, the very one that showed the picture of the lake in an old faded color snapshot, peeling off the softcardboard back, a tree bleaching to white and a rowboat tied up to a piling stood on by a bird.
The last day of the year, the light fading, I and others putting a handbrush to a old old horse. The horse won’t see this time next year. Its grey mane, the circle of time pressed down into its back, its slow patient eyes that are planets of language – all these will have vanished by the same time next year, making it not the same. A horse’s leg is a signpost in the road, showing the turnoff. Take it or not. Spend a frigid night in its gutted steaming innards, swathed in the library of blood. I REMEMBER, the arrow reads. Volumes.
Deals cut, occupations mistakenly called marriage, talent mistakenly called love; the names of things.
I’ve one elbow in the dike, the arm holding the hand mirror. I could live on the land and kiss the city a wet one good good bye. An explosion of many contacts awaits my return to the Borough of my birth, and then the ball will be in the air, a hundred voices calling for it, but I’ve got the bead on it, and I’m in the right spot. Watch it into the glove.
I should have asked, What did you mean by what you said? I should have said, Your father is dead. If you want me to be him, you’re a murderer. Instead I helped, I cared, I soothed. Fed the dying horse. Put the earthtonguesmell on my hand of its mouth in my glove. Watched the night’s greyblue cover slide down the earth's hip to reveal all of space. And when the alarm went off, when the clock lost an arm, we each pointed a festive pistol at one another, and pulled our paper triggers.
Being married is probably the best thing I’ve ever done for myself. The hatchet come down on the boat rope in the photo that set the whole world adrift. I needed to get out more.