cicada shell rustles distaste
on tongue and language spells idiocy like love spells war--
mud in eyes now like blood on knees
and a fistful of teeth in the belly of
a burnt offering. forgetting
shift-shoft of broken
wings, plastered on plaster,
dust suffocates limbs like
a mental ward pillow and a noose hung high.
fingers tangle in sigyls of non-motion
and running away, feet pounding surf of highway
to a neverwhere, to a place beyond existence
somewhere out in the middle of dusk and morning,
to cicadian to circadian
pulse.
pulse in hands, in throat and jaw
and a jawbone hang on the wall,
sticky sweet with honey and hibernation,
when pa caught recoil in heavy hands
and taught survival like a veteran of war,
he said that this hand goes there and twist that and snap and
wait until the feet stop kicking.
fingers draw jagged on the teeth of the mountains climbed,
stark white with snowy calcium;
toes turned to stark sky, extremities
met with veins calcifying: frost.
sugarspun turns viscous, marshwater
and beating stomachs of bullfrogs, croak
creak, cracking 'cross water and reeds
to read with callous fingers--
there are magnolias in the heat and they
crackle underfoot like fireworks, brown and green and
dying fireworks, a decade more and maybe they'll be gone,
gone like you are gone,
past the horizon now, swampy and sharp.
your feet are sore; your mouth tastes of cicadas.
