Mosquito Read Free Page B

Cause
    â€” for SY
    Â 
    A week & we crawl. We lisp.
Soaked in shine, the crooked
I am fine. In my head
turns progressions idle.
Steady wick the livid clouds.
    Â 
    We print names in blood
on white T-shirts. Scratch
steady to shine. Moonlight
confounds us nasty & the heart
murmurs. Baggies of ash, mothball
    Â 
    white. It used to be & it is. Steady
arm, go steady. The beginning begins
& someone cries—you shouldn’t know
how. Infinite desolation & shine.
Come steady, let’s drive all night.
    Â 
    We’ll sing the get by & broken
will press from our lips. Dawn
is always a fistfight, don’t be afraid.
Purity is butterfly-stomached & pallid.
Purity will never find a place so divine.

The Pleasure Notebook
1
    Bend closer—taste the thumbprint mirror, lick a bit
of struck-match mercy
    Â 
    Shadow-laced & red, light helps splinter the cruelty met with
a flayed body

    What named me, the moth pleads, banging jazz
from lightbulbs
    Â 
    Whose flash can raw a perfect face?
Meaning is the glistening cobweb
Smooth, a spider’s deceptive legs

    I need breath thick with fire, syrup spilled from a swollen
heart
    Â 
I need bites promising grace. Luminous, a tongue that prays
for wounds

2
    Naked shapes devour winter light
They sizzle, salt the topography of despair
    Â 
    Stare & the body’s brittle math twists into uncertainty
Mime-lips mashing sleet-swept cheeks

    I say nothing in defense of the hand
    Â 
    But praise drool’s fine silk stringing from a thigh
    Â 
    The furred wing wrenched off in honey

    A static-voice hammers thick over the leafless tree’s growling
    Â 
    Sheets are sap-streaked like bark
    Â 
    Tonight—brass-knuckled love, weep & birthmarks break
from the self
3
    I don’t care that you sleep on your stomach, groaning
fortune-cookie koans all night

    The limb’s edged knots & I come just thinking of you
    Â 
    Emperor of gasps, paradise of sweaty face

    Feed me the slow lesson of flowers, plum pits knocking
teeth & dark
    Â 
    My skin is everyone’s magic trick. How couldn’t it be?
    Â 
    What sad-luck damage would you trade for taste?

    Melodies drill deep wells in the chest
4
    As a child I worshipped chains worming through gravel. But
now
    Â 
    Is sugar from a heartwormed pit bull, benediction slaps
from tattooed gods

    Kiss my reflection into brick walls, carve me golden & throaty

5
    Streets are gorgeous with pissing dogs, red-petal tongues
& grandfather cartwheeling with muscled legs
    Â 
    He didn’t feel the heart’s disintegration
on the slick tile floor. A percussive
    Â 
    axe cracking the bathroom door. Bleached radio
piercing the sun with a tune I’ll never remember
6
    Touch the photo that peels clothes. Hunger for it like bare
feet
    Â 
    On sun-slivered pavement, cricket legs longing for rubs
    Â 
    Slip me into that train-track bed, torsos weaving
    Â 
    Wicked & blue. City of fence-rust, streetlights bulling for life
    Lopsided with fog, what must passengers think staring
down dawn?
    Â 
    Bodies arched into something only sewers can name
    Â 
    Orchard of polished ghosts, flesh pimpled
with rain

    Teeming wordless & terrible, grief dangles
from concrete fruit
7
    My yard is frail with crushed cans, flat-sailed rubbers
    Â 
    It is the felled redbreast’s grass-jawed grave
    Â 
    Bottle caps like diamonds buried in a finger-box of ribs

    Â 
    Jigsaw morning, the branch hisses mud

    Trodden & cubist. Too much gesso & not enough light
    Â 
    Paint my nothing portrait, use amphetamines
    Â 
    Paint the gift of the neon wasp

    It is the year of the dismembered horse
Bury me with bone-dice instead of eyes

Juke Joint
    I’d strip, peel myself to show you
the jukebox of hearts. Still,
you’d frown, say that’s nothing—
a foot pressed into river mud,
movie dialogue edited for TV
where the bad guy turns cotton
candy. Boxer-veins streaking
his forehead, he aims the pistol,
shucks, he says, mouth twisted
into