the pockmarks from the solitude. you love your nerves
twinged and the crimson drip beneath your tongue
that you can’t drain alone. hey, tell ‘em, suck

and it’s like licking the bed of a lucky fountain, wish
and wish and gravestone, but taste isn't enough.
has never been. there’s no story without your fingers

in their throat, so you’re staring down the wellspring
and thinking of the telling, but even when you reemerge,
glowing and pruned, even after they’ve chewed

the miserable silt, you’re still the only one
who’s ever bruised their knees black, drunk as sin,
and you’re still the only one who’s prayed.

TRICK OF THE BLACK LIGHT

cackling i’m thrust through the labyrinth
of mirages and powder,
headaches and shadow-split hoopla, all
by legs i’ve supposed to be mine.

artificial fog clings
to the echoing cavern of my throat and my jawbone
stitches in line
tongue tied with lime and almond
salt and

where the mist dissipates
so many pale necks stuck out for the picking.

misfits sing in my blind spot intonation pain-
passion girl-eyes odd with neon green
and ultratime

fingers are all that’s needed to usher further through the mine-
field pressed in the soft
pink above my elbows.

in unexpected places
i like to think how did i get here followed by
this body i mean how is it here and tonight
i’ve decided i’m doing a fine job at being
a body all full of drink and chip
grease and its desire to please—

isn’t she living! isn’t she just! that manic
aphrodite spreading all her good living
all over the walls

fooled!

this

better face contorted

with pleasure

clever

smoke and mirrors

look closer

and see the pitiless filth sessions

from place to pointless place in the house ego

death haze—

doesn’t matter.
here i race the skittish avon holy in the streetlamp
halos on the dirty ground
climb these technicolor foothills held held
holding
press glossy metal to my lips like a right lover
under night’s nipping cover alive and aliver love red-
wrung muscles doing their welcome throb and no one needs
to tell me i’m doing it right,
i know. later i’ll peel
myself
from the earth baptized in dew
subdued by daylight made different
different if not new
but that was me too who howled
out dog days and dripped from the rafters
who will someday turn
her finest self into more than a half-lie

II.

THE PARAKEETS WHICH FLY IN GREENWICH PARK

are ring-necked parakeets and are not supposed to be
here. they’re all over london and no one’s sure where
they came from but there’s a rumor that in the sixties
jimi hendrix released a breeding pair like some deity,
avian adam and eve sent unchecked onto the metropolis
and now the descendants cry wild, hysterical vapors
of lime, all the tumbling earth green but them a different
sort—and they’re perched above canary wharf as if
it’s what they’re owed. at the observatory i tease the descent
with my feet, forty-five degrees against the grain down
from the precipice, and the dirt is dry and sharp against
the heels of my hands, which hurts but i want it to. lately i
think mainly of my own hollow bones. maybe i’m more feral
than i figured, cherry flesh ripe, my instinct the pit. i’ll let this
life spread me out like a sky. remember, even the sun wants us
dead. so worried about belonging when we’re all tangled
in the celestial root: chaos wants for no one but i was
released, and for a time, survived.