From my upcoming book, Professional Poetry, published by White Hole Press…
Keeping Up with the Huidobros
I was born at the age of eight on the cut
of no Christ; gin and tonic was the equator of my
hairless pain under the geraniums of the German
piano, a cuddy beneath bergs. I had the blank
stare of a victim, a relentless bicycle. I breathed
in the next blind father upon a trapeze bar, I loved
the daylight, the curtain of every hat. My mother spoke
with larks coming from her mouth, she embroidered
buttons to my breast. On the first day,
I asked the larks to un-beak these buttons,
to look upon the nudes of the gallery,
to collect the broken shells of rational hearts.
Then I created my tongue and braided my grave.
I constructed my development from my grandmother’s
slips and Russian soap stars upon the tombs of sublime
retinal failure. Speeding gold chessboards of sight,
perhaps they preferred disconnection so as not to see
the disconnected language sculpted from this life;
perhaps when disengaged, the last sigh of vision
delivered untangled tropes. I looked at my fists,
angled as accordions, a horse upon each virgin
extracted for the stain of sleep, the illusion of hair.
Where the blood of my vain tongue slipped into my
father’s glass and burned my skin an effigy; of phone
cords and exoplanets of bound light; each season a blister
of stone; I, a little soldier who fights. All of my
throats the planets, money wired to each wintry
renewal of skin, more skin, all the skin I could
grow. I drank the hunters, the cascades of bile,
each hammer of my selves a bitter astronomy. There
is a secret to my vertigo, it’s my gills in a sea
of handkerchiefs. I was born at the age of eight
on the cut of no Christ; gin and tonic
was the equator of my hairless pain.
True poems are fires; its conquests
lit with shivers of pleasure or pain.