[ATC]

1.27.2006

This is a private rapture.

With a succession of receptionists,
nurse-geisha-doll-domina-card shark bitch
and its home from now on and I've run out
of little sick pills and everything
tastes like window.

This is what counting bars looks like on a Friday
and introspection changes peripheral vision so there are places
where you can be taught blindness and you can make friends
with the wafting odor of the rats nests with their trains of beef
steadily aching from lack of recycling and before you know,
you are out on the street and the restless earth
looks much cleaner with your tongue resting
along its cleft palate and with each slow lick,
the very marrow is inhaled in its primordial soup,
the way it was meant to be eaten
long before the French decided to place limits
on gourmet because their language allows them the freedom
to choose, to change
meaning and what means the world today
will sound like fluff in a few hours with no one
left on the sidelines to protest
this dumbing down, this singular little death
of language when lucid.

My squiggly alphabet is the precursor
to my throat and the letter O sounds the way it does
because the larynx, that precious foghorn
knows no other way to convey the rapture
of the circles of unending lines, pulsating
in spirals, deeper still and faster and louder
until it escapes the confines of the skeleton-
the outer world stripped of oxygen
makes it sound so much harsher.

My letters to my mother are saved in newsprint
not because I don't care about the trees but because
I do - there is no easy way to broadcast my thoughts
simpler than having gestalts engrave them
on cadavers with their identities masked by acres of pulp,
unopened and unread, I think she waits
in a thankless state of grace
where every second conveys a single word
from among the piles of paper-airplanes on my shelf-
She will piece together this epiphany
two years later when my telepathic papers will have
run their course.

These are the things
only the pavement knows and you can't know them
because unlike me, you're sober and its Saturday already.