TOO HOSTILE TOO TICKING

summer’s corpse breath
has me whirring mad across the inanimate

bridge from canning town to the docks.
i'm less than nuisance. less than dust. there’s passing

regard of the gut-knuckled wind, ricocheted
from half-scrapers and cranes and fellow

faceless travelers, which, yeah, if you need
to know, makes me think of the pavement

doused in the copper blaze of fantasy blood
spatter, like, i wanna snuff out some of that magic

god-given stuff with my hands, that’s how bad
this is. the gossamer blot which begins in my gums

which is me but not me says everything is ruined
and it is. mouth rinsed in hot dread. i need to never

be touched again. i need every human body stacked
on top of mine, crushing. still, there’s always light:

the tessellated dark matter, rootless stars and me,
on fire. quick, a riddle: which phenomenon

is capable of producing the fiercest rage, yet cares
the least about it? the walk home from the night

bus takes ten minutes and somehow
i don’t appreciate a damned second.

THE DIFFERENCE

today the sun drenched
a shadowless soul
spilt over with calm
and beginning;

still it drifts in the non-place
between the two:
feeling alive, and feeling
like living

AN IMPECCABLE FUNCTIONAL DESIGN

you, doomless and new, shake out the sock
full of the once-bodies of gastropods

and mollusks, soft animals, now softer.
left behind their permablacks, saw-toothed

manors of magnolia, sage, heather, pleated
peach and tangerine. i think of my own

biological paint: table cream, gunmetal,
the spent smear of oxidized copper scrubbed

from the sheets, the color of dirt—yes, fine,
i’m jealous of the dead things. i imagine the honor

of creating a keepsake with only with my body,
to leave behind, to be loved, long after,

and oh, we’re back! here it rages, the rotten
horse which breaknecks towards my frontal lobe,

come to seek the sole rider. smack my lips
while i still can to rile the bitter tang.

adages of the voidal trance: oil your face
(flesh-death) and peel the orange (flesh-death)

and fuck (flesh-death-flesh, by the way,
did you know, inside you, you can grow

a whole story of pain?) look around,
there’s never not a wrong organ, or something

sheathed in skin, something else to flay—
and that’s how this goes, careening in the curl

of an infinity i’ve been told can’t be hostile,
which doesn’t explain the scars, or the purple fat

which drips onto my cheeks. gentleness is often
enough—a long, blue breath. you hold the shells

as if they don’t belong to ghosts, so tame with what
you love. there’s one shaped like a corkscrew,

arched brushstrokes tightened into a dense
central point, straining like a shut eye, coiled

into itself, no—itself a coil, and so i decide this
is merely the way of things, spiraling. did you mean

to say infinity, or just a very large number? before this,
we walked to the far green. you smelled like orange