Sick ink vomited belly up on the throw rug as if I had forgiven it, the swallowed ball 5 of my poisonous poem, a loaded ode to limitlessness and light- What trash! as if the sky- vapid and superior in its imperial blues didn't know how to bite! 10 Mistakes, mistakes! The pen's a miracle of mayhem, wild slips of a wrist once slitted; the bleeding, careering nib, a molt of details in the schizophrenic flow: 15 my mangy life, my frozen embryo carelessly cast from the shelf, unlidded and palely little. The cornflower fists 20 ache to begin, the watery lungs two skinned, amniotic fish. A bonfire, a bonfire! Something huge and ruinous with real red in it! That's what goes, what really goes 25 with this stone decor, this face hung in a mirror slashed to tears. Heat, heat anything to exhaust this caustic blank in my being, torn calendar- 30 Journals, drawn loves, alien lines poems mouthed from poems -dead-weight papers pushed to a death heap a Jew harvest at Dachau- Perfect things 35 as final as a corpse, ashes to ashes. The matchsticks itch to finish it. Irritable Rubicon 40 of lava, language vulcanized on language, I cross you languidly. I am nearly asleep in the oxygenless air. I am tired, tired, tired of curses, tired of cures 45 tired of the alphabet. The wall, infinite sheet, turns intense as an oven, the nails must be melting... And here I stand 50 awash and exhausted, perfumed in the rolls of corpse-smoke, words burned to whorls. Too tired to live, to die, to anything kilned in skin.
From the collection "The Soft Assault"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.