Lullaby for the Beast

Why do I speak at your grave?

You: whose ears have disintegrated

under this grass ten years ago,

cannot hear me

but a fly landed in the groove of your name,

flew to the flowers I brought as if to say

thank you. My tears ran— so did a deer

from the tall grasses across the field.

Do you play hide-and-seek with marble?

The brush under my thighs tickles.

Two burning red bite marks appear.

Well, I wouldn’t put it past you.

Is that you blowing kisses on my cheek?

I ask aloud in case it is. I don’t want

  She would live, then, mentally in a state of constant puberty

swelling beyond what her saltshaker hula hoop frame could endure.

As her Lisa Frank sticker collection had lost its adhesiveness from being rearranged too often,

so did she cling again and again onto dry surfaces until she no longer stuck.

She went eavesdropping through walls of arcade booth consciousness, that she might unearth the ancient secrets which her parents seemed to know but weren’t telling;

they had only moaned a rough translation, muffled by pillows and plaster.

Alas! she wasn’t satisfied with guessing which hand the quarter was sleeping in, or how much candy was at the bottom of the clenched paper bag, or where the pale colored eggs were hidden— so should anyone who seemed more articulate, even a traveling magician, would but intimate the answers which only her body could seek, then perhaps she granted them a wink.

I’d like to think her seahorse ear is hypersensitive to the singed dandelions

set ablaze by a jester-sage for a mere glimpse at the boarded-up window of beauty,

that she is picking up on a trail of scents-memory perceptions where illusions have been buried.

What was the problem again? she wonders. Was it for this that they filed the boys and the girls

into separate rooms for a lecture on puzzle-making? Was it for this that she grew up and away from herself, even sacrificed limbs for a taste of the Other? Indeed it was for this that she could no longer fit inside of herself, so she went knocking on the bread-maker’s door asking:

“Please Sir, can you make me a bigger box? I simply can’t carry these crumbs in my skirt any more than a mountain can hold an avalanche.”

for relaxation purposes

I want you to think of skin grafts

from pigs and cadavers,

bed sores and foot drop,

bald spots and Mrsa,

plastic tubes for breathing and feeding,

splints, respirators, rotating bone saws,

and think again.

  Picture women on a beach

trying not to gawk.

Imagine children who

are unafraid to scream.

Your father, unreligious,

reading the bible

over your sterile tent.

Your mother pushing soup away

and signing release forms

with anchors for eyelids.

  My grandfather warned

about the risky wick,

rooms filling slowly with fumes,

but nobody listened.

Should I thank god or gamblers

he changed the batteries

Eleven days left. You can do this.

a knuckle it cracks in the dark

a worm in somebody's birthday cake

flicks a lighter to spark

or flips the page of a journal

or probes a needle with thread

somewhere a finger is surely twitching

it does not sleep when it's dead

a doorknob turns in limbo

a cuticle bites itself

the climbing flesh it grips the edge

of some unearthly bookshelf

somewhere a finger is twitching 

or tuning electric guitars

the alien hand will never rest