You must understand I killed the rock but it’s still here, lodged in my thousands of eyes. I don’t know how to stop feeling or singing. I am telling of my first love.
It is smart ecstasy of our souls’ uncomfortableness: then, it dies and a little girl talks.
I am telling of my war with its humiliating trees. Children cloud pieces. A mild bit of blood mixing with water a puffed up soul. Breath and mothers. When she talks a radiant heaviness. As if a thread’s grief at god. Untrapped throat, since I have no throat, untrapped brain, since I have no brain, and underneath, dangling, a pausing knock-kneed freshness. I don’t have a body I am not a river. I let the ghost of the throat desire bones in it since I know now this horrible language I must write in write about my first love’s death the skull found on the side of the road and my untrapped skull, since I have no skull, and I don’t understand body parts. When I write this is hot and acid, like puking—molten—a plume of grease evaporating your throat. Being gone is already a wall you don’t even need me to say ‘wall’ wall wall wall wall wall wall wall wall wall wall wall wall wall
I loved one rock.
It died because of me.
Death doesn’t exist.
Don’t you think it hurts to die?
Maybe there’s a wall at the end of everything.
A finger, like a wall that touches.
The day we went to war with terror still a seahorse existed curling sideways next to coral & in the ground you dug looking for grubs; some bat dove for insects while nearby I ran up the grass stem towards a water-drop and good proteins digesting every- where in all the proper tubes and squareness as yet belonging to the square nevertheless it only made sense that his hooves split where a thorn pierced in and the air equally concerned with order as with invention no one guessed water’s tunneling through the hill in search of a starving daughter or the way wolves thought of planets as they stared at the sky and in the next camp over a fire making its new swallowing sound “a something overtakes the mind— we do not hear it coming” still the river maintaining gleefully its pausing knock-kneed freshness—
Ghost:
I untrapped my throat
from my brain and all
my parts (radiant, heavy)
were sorted out kind of
still I couldn’t speak
about the walls in bodies
but I can only tell you this:
walls do exist (not sidewalks)
in bodies
2nd Ghost:
But the other ghost is lying
ghosts don’t have bodies anymore
(they pluck your throat out
and put a cloud there)
I can’t talk I just bloom
and I bloom and I wave
it’s true things do die even terror
the walls are in distant sense-pieces
we’re just the grief of a thread
we exist somewhere
Ghost:
Okay you ghost-ghost
I get to tell a secret now
even desire has bones in it
even terror does, even days do
bones like doors!
At the beginning of this poem I’m a person not a lake. I’ve been pushed behind minds and asked where are your Guess jeans? When we are corpses greenly dead and with black bloom but what is a little seahorse life compared to a whale’s life? Poor seahorse dad caught in the pipe of an oil rig getting his little feathery gill tiny tinies all refracted and coated in oil and pain: a quiet seahorse blood spurt if it even has blood. Remember the shock & awe bombing thing of Baghdad? Seahorses all fluttering around trying not to die. They’re in a war; do they even buy things and go on vacation? This is a poem that ate those people and can’t get rid of them. How in of this poem. How Guess jeans. How purposeful of this poem to make strides to extract those dead people from its stomach. Whatever: the war is barely available to this poem! Whatever, you can’t turn me in to the cops: I’m a lake. I’ve been hiding bodies in my grey bottoms and their flesh tears off like kleenex right into me. Southern Iowa is far away from me, biscuits and pig gravy, but parts of it dissolve into me. Even Cody’s sky can’t help but tear apart its blue bricks and flake right on into me. The best way to kill nothing is to be a lake. But death will enter you even if you don’t die. Because of life’s awesomeness! To not die is a kind of intelligence. What war? In my sting soul in my rock soul in my slick slick slick. . .I feel colors I say they are grey. You greyness you greyness you don’t even know what a war is! Glacial mom-wars from which I was formed like dirt’s breath in the undone ice blood! A child. Hi I am round as an eye with a water stomach.