What Are You Coming Home To

THE KIND OF FEAR THAT MAKES YOU HIDE IN THE LIGHT
in my coat watching the snow fall into perfect cocaine lines from the telephone wires. do you feel yourself becoming powder on hot skin? the white hot pain washing over my eyes. sinking into my earmuffs. is your body hard like a car that won't start?
walking in the street, holding my chest, my cheeks and lip begins its wintry mourning. on the top of the hill, the sunset waning down into the earth, a figure black against the fervid candelabra. the world is suddenly empty, and i am suddenly full of something needing to be snuffed out.
you never even had to consider there were mean dogs out there, let alone killing them. i see everyone as a cold slab of meat, i trim off the fat, trip over their excess of red, feel the life that once was in the skin of some carcass, some deceiver in the early grey mornings, green and dull where the street lanterns spill overflowing with grief. i run my fingers down some dog's chest, his body cold and shivering, and i don't feel cold at all. in the snow i let it wash over my skin, sit in the river and watch the thawing maggots stir in the heat of some stomach, digging their graves in that red cavity. until body comes undone in the cold, losing all hinderance, all life, ripping itself into threads. i crawl in the white heat like i was really a new life, like i really was not dug up from the endless dream in the rain, an incandescent rage, my body becoming a crypt. stapled airless wings to me, penetrating me with blue butterfly needles, body made of marrow, when you crack it open you can smell the semen, the vomit, the unbearable neglect thats been injected all over me. cut open, wherever i stepped, grew a graveyard, spidery grass, balmy heat, deep and unrecoverable fog, and i was its colossus of suffering. every body i touch becomes fevered, blistered. every head i hold bloats and explodes into the syrupy pink and black tendrils of life, like kuzu all over the walls.
i can't console you. fingers like purple medication, bruising my neck and wrists, i was supposed to be a spectre, a putrescence so unfettered, a body so molded so flushed and impure. a grub in the sun. the bugs curling up all over me, their tears lifted into heaven. the grass like nails, brown and heathered, in that hot dirt i am abandoned, in the sun everything dies, even the larvae, so sweet and soft and squishy, a body like mine. same gutted belly. a misery defiled, cannibalistic self patronage, a purity unlike mine. how bodied their eyes make me out to be, how ugly i am in that stifled daylight. all i taste is the blood of iron pipes and bitter petals. i am stiching a scar my same size, shot out of the sky. a million bodies could not match the heat inside mine. dust collects along the outline of a body, a body that is mine. a thousand places i've left it to rest, a thousand rotting blankets, pissed in beds, carpet burn on my lips and cheeks.
an elevator shaft made of a crack in the door, chipping white paint, peeling wallpaper. fat lipped, eyelids flooding over. a great mumbling, a neglected pounding of fists against body. making muscles tremble pushing piss through the walls. incinerating at the break of dawn, holding the world's eyelids back, peeling the dry skin from lips, letting the blood rush to your head. its all the sound of a faucet between my ears. its the entire can of bugspray, until the lightbulb becomes a breast of insecticide, dripping on my nightgown. and im suddenly a cricket baby. how cold do my fingers have to get in the cold until i go inside. how cold do my legs have to get before i go inside. how numb does my face have to blush before i bring myself inside. how dark does the sun get in the sky, the dull petals of an anemone, the black eye of her center, im running until my lungs are bloodless, until every breath i take is shredding me, until the cicadas dig themselves in the meat of my throat, until im dirt.
im putting myself to bed. im pissing the bed. deliver me into the cradle of bathtub, into the highest blackmold ceiling, an entire quilt of dust and sorrow. put me there and let me still humiliate myself. im monster. in my violence i am born again and again and again and again. cicada born and fucked into cicada born and fucked into cicada born and fucked in cicada until i am the largest empty shell of nothing, until i am the smallest monstrous stuffy swan larvae. grey feathers in my bones im snarling in human mouth im bashing the brain back into the earth im stuffing my fingers in the mouth im reenacting my crucifiction in the mouth and its tears crashing down and bleeding and whatever human lies there will always be more beautiful than me. put any body there and i am always monster.