The feast

I watch the clock's broad face high upon the wall:

                it blossoms and bursts with hours,

                it is a prettily posed hour-flower,

                each segment is a bright petal, pivoting

                upon the slender stem of midnight. 

Blade secretly palmed,

                time caresses the flower, then

                presses hard his hidden inner edge

                and with a single, swift stroke,

                removes the day to fold and press and thumb it

                into his book and slot it on the shelf forever.

Ice chimes in my glass   

                and black, pungent absinthe

                coils its tendrils around my heart,

as I tease the volume from its interstice

                and peel the pages left and right

                about the spine of time

My finger finds the lines

                for which the lanterns of my eyes were lit.

Since the day I was woken,

                expelled from the womb, all light burst open

                and split and spilled and slid tumbling out,

                diurnal sun displacing mother’s heartbeat as my timepiece,

                and the gentle glowing sunrise in which I endlessly slept

                usurped by a waking tyranny of sunrise and sunset,

I have been embarked upon

                a secret search for lost intimacy,

                a dark and secret thing of shame

                in this wide open world of unforgiving light.

It was not found

                among the gentle deceptions of tenderness

                where deceit knots and coils itself tight

                around the roots of every winter rose

                that lingers in the stiff marshy cold of that garden

                where I watch breath hang in the air

                despite the heavy lie it carries, 

and so I expose myself alone

                in remote, violent and desolate wastelands,

                rust red deserts that no heart-pump can irrigate,

                knowing that my own destruction is more sincere

                than the smiles that pillowed my soul among men

                while their smoky words were still shifting in the air.

I will rip out the wolf's windpipe with my teeth,

                and steal his howl and with it bind the moon

                and take it down as a dish to lick greedily

                at my own oblivion. Every snail is a tongue

                with which I find clean unsullied soil to consume.

I inhale the fatal moonlight,

                burrow into atoms to find their sullen stolen souls,

                shuffle spectral lines to deal death's gambits

                upon idyllic pacific ocean island atolls,

                from a clear blue sky beset with the twisted spine

                of man's con-trails and con-tricks.

I fall slug-tongued upon the famine-feast of burnt dirt,

                and shovel through apocalyptic ash

                seeking to digest my own disintegration

                but all I find is you, here, now:

feast on me.