Blood will do. As long as I’m sieged from weeping,
blood is easy. To slowly tear the wings until a thing

torn from itself is its whole self and won’t grieve
a flight it can’t recall: yes, I believe I’ve

been a vestige of that act, but the wind crowds
my ankles and shepherds away the shreds

of that, too. No reason now but to believe I sprang
fully grown into madness. That I crawled along

a canyon floor, ear to the rough for the traces
of the river my mother was, was yesterday’s

dream. Today is a new grave to upset.
The dragged man’s head, on the heels of what

is no longer recognizable as a man, molts—
its over-marched boot mostly tongue—and lilts

aloof as horsehair in these breaths the wheels’
blurred turning set going. The troubled dust devils

the wake and then falls, dispirited, into the flytrap
the remaining eye now merely is. In the first lap

the horror high had me so far outside of time I
rounded a corner and had turned my back on me.





I have wanted, to the teeth, to own what I love.
I loved a man ruthlessly. He let me give

what I could—mostly my body, and too
tenderer parts: watched me strain to undo

my silence like it was a hit-ready harness,
understood it as a gauze, knew too well the grimace

stitched across us both. In ensuring his survival,
I did try to be as harmless as humanly possible

and, with a kind of cosmic success, failed often.
What of my spit was in him has been given

to the ground; and what of my spirit, to hell—
how else would I think of it? That life was idyll.

I’ve fucked up and lived to long to come to grips
with the laws of chaos, still holding out my hopes

like jars for catching rain: contents will manifest
or they won’t. I have large hands and the most

porous fists. I am the kind of cautionary poem
that no one anymore has the peacetime

to memorize. In my marrow screams a horse-
drawn savage. I was loved, to make matters worse.





If any single murder is a martyring, imagine
the pageant of saints I engrave on one citizen.

My provocation, this perfect line I draw
completes its circle just as each mouth’s O

stains the wrinkled blouse of an awful face.
The way a blister howls its rawness and the vice

grip loosens, resumes being flesh-swaddled bone—
One by one, their bodies go limp as if to regain

humanity is to blanche, breathlessly . . . I don’t
much wonder about people anymore. Precedent

alone is immortal. Even the gods can be made
so unlike themselves under the right blade.

I was he who heaven most favored because
I most favored heaven: my interminable blues,

my interludes of silver oblivion, my purple rage
a shock veined through my brow’s bucking umbrage.

I was made so like the idea of a man that when I kill
whatever blood on my palm is unequivocally animal.





Why isn’t this sufficient? I hear the tactic tear.
I fissure. In the fifth lap I left the body of Hector

in dregs along the rim of my skull’s gray bowl.
The months in a hull I fettered and loaded the mule

of irresponsible violence are recycling their moons.
Here, one hovers its rust-ruddy pearl like a glans

the horizon’s mortar of stones chafes unsacked.
I’m chasing its tantalus dangle. I have hooked

my crimes committed and prayed for through
my ankles, and now the earth for all its due

grates my back. What good is blame that it must
be taken? Is it like a life? I could hoist

a corpse with the stiffness of death like an iron rod
in each of its limbs and lumber up a cobbled road

a while, but a whole life? I’d flattened this man
before I flattened him finally. I was immune

to sighs of a desperate city slipknotting his neck
and plagued to the spleen by what he would take from me—

the smell like blame already on him,
sharp, and buried to the wrist beneath his arm.

Listen. I’m saying look and look and look again
at what I’ve gone and done. Here was a goon

seven passes in the making. I am trying to see
the side of him I suspect—I deny it—is inside of me.





Whose sorrow is a bedpost-bound ward, and whose
sorrow tosses itself from the tower of him: these

are both the sort of man I am. I scoop my grief
in handfuls of shattered spine and feathers and stuff

and stitch it closed and bring the beast home. I sleep
in the wilderness of my losses. I let forgetting cup

my penis in a wine-drunk dream, but when I wake
I am awake. This moment holds me for my own sake.

Have I expected too many blessings to admit
I desire it, the knowledge of dying? And dug out

the trench, and emptied over it a thousand throats to keep
that kingdom from being my own. For my keep

in the House of the Living, reaping has been my labor.
My luggage is uproarious. Yes, I’m afraid to sober

out of the blood in which I was born soaked from head up
to heel, afraid that when I look back and the reins drop,

there the dead will be, pristine, at once unmoved
and yet waiting, to either side of the road paved

with the hem of my own skin, preanimate as bells
in hungry lunging distance of the rope that trails

my car. And they will wrong me hollow,
and they will ring my hollows, and you will know

what claps in the cavity, what wants everything
in this world as rattled as it is.

                     Let me be let let me be rung.