image via New England Reptile Distributors
Love objects and situations that were rejected! Sleep with a snake that clings. Clings because ……………………………...…………………........it is cold-blooded. Cry all day long. Thought it was love! It was love! It was…………..…… heat. Objects emanate the crispy warmbulb glow of familiar……..……..proximity! Not exhausted by touch even after years. Walls restless with creamy imagination. Images throb with damp melancholy! Peaceful …..…………….……amputees. Vibrant tongues poke from linedrawn lips. Taste pokes! Pink pokes! Sad bloated heads sprout cheerful flowers……………….with tongues! Objects that are damaged or worn are more flavorful. I am small and polite! But my taste is large! I am limbless; pissing, dreaming, masturbating………….head with poking tongue. Taste the smoky air! It’s impossible to do nothing. I am inert but my organs are moving! Busy creating…………….the next excretion! Men frantically masturbating in close proximity to women. Her organs are frantic! I, A WOMAN, gaze out of my prisonbody less preoccupied with how to escape than with what I can do with it today. Flesh; a concept I try to feel. A woman alive in a country ruled by a fascist dictator and his fascist friends; The Real Dictators. How many dictators make it a frivolously democratic afternoon tea party with delicate cakes and silver tea kettle doilies? They don’t know that I licked all the doilies before they reclined on their chaises! Again and again and again to the body with awe and bewilderment! What I can do to it; what other people want to do to it; what it can do back. My body is always up to something! Look! A small stack of cigarettes, for babies! Babies who know how to love …………………………………………..warmth. I return to imagination with a vigor that expresses exhausted relief. From the sickbed: fingernails, teeth, claws and eyes with lashes explode………………. shed snakeskin shimmering glitter scales like damp day masturbation like tiny wet vertical surfaces penetrating air ………………………………………………to tinkling Japanese music! From a sore throat: ………………………………….cosmic emissions pertaining to sight, touch and taste? Blobs and stains: a grubby celebration…………………………… soiled confetti rain! A delicate sensation of sin tickles! Makin’ pictures without knowin’ exactly why and not mindin’! engorged member of the physical world BIG watery image _________________________________TINY snakebite of words Pictures spray fabulousness superfluity from a loose snakeskin fire hose in my dreams ………………………………..my grip on that pole loosens………………………………….. But the work is vital to my life! It has another type of currency that I invented! Why can’t I shed…………………………………….my working class trappings???? The POLE grows back like an invasive vine. Some dance on the pole......................upside down……….……..….in the living room! I have to keep making work to cut the poles back or they’ll take over completely and collapse my headspace. Maybe a more positive way to think about this is that poetics clean the plaque off a person…………..…………………………………repetition exfoliates the personskin. And…………………………………………………….…….grounds my epistemic vigilance. If that ground loosens....................................... something new can take root! Short steps. That’s the rhythm I keep. I keep short time. Here they come up the stairs!