countdown toward finalities

file fingertips into sterling silver points

serrated like bread knife, hungry to cut away at words in need of further diagnosis.

work toward revision
enter the poem with questions

photo by Francesca Woodman

don’t make the reader feel dizzy

searched urgency
declare

supper with sadness
press into carbon and oxygen and choke.

[NOTE: Imagine a word with limbs, long enough to be pulled or bent. Imagine a word with pre-determined illness or allergy. The metalanguage conceived in the spread out stanzas or found in the tightly-packed prose poems or couplets can be viewed as odors. A smell takes shape when rubbed against or mixed with the container in which it starts from: food, human, bottle.

think of poems as suicide letters
desperate medications

To exit: how it feels to be entrenched in these poems, write the pain of it, the journey, trauma, translated hurt-songs, scar chants.

{how to} walk off a stage or poem and be normal.

strap magnifying lenses against pupils/ detect hidden fibers defining each line

Get it before she dies and no clarity can be given.

Look away. Diagnose. Crush pills onto tongue repeat daily. Quiet the crazy creative emotive.

How sad to be inside a body that can never be clean enough

Practice the angular motion of disintegration

uniqueness derives from in-
ability to
see all

Notice a tree.
Write about it.

Its bark is infected like homeless mother’s limbs with skin weathered from winter and bed bugs.

Go outside.
Write about it.

I stare at an open field and search for the bodies held captive by tall wheat or poison ivy.

Visit amusement park for children called zoo.
Write about it.

I see an elephant and describe its skin as heated crust. I count each fracture disrupting the smooth. I call it monster call it mammal of wild grey call it me in the evening when enough bodies have rubbed against me to feel bloated and heavy, a swell of weight.

What happens to the spread of body, torn apart to make a statement?

Bones, carefully grown tissue formed by osteoblasts, or specialized cells, contain salt and strength, though not enough to fight away the sadness or sense of not enough. The similarities in these excerpts arise in desperation. We must destroy self or space around us in order to make a statement.

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. . ………What cannot feel can still feel.