from GALL
before spark there’s current in the wire. Above the electric field, stars glimmer near the fences’ hum-hush, get weaker. I want in a plane quick to throb nowhere. I know it doesn’t tell half of anything, one scene. Conch, vale, car, dock. When we were supernovas in the double-wide bar I didn’t mind the mirage. That Thanksgiving morning I sat with my sister. The mauve bedroom carpet, the arsenal of Valium. The best tope, the best turkey and gravy. Some moods can only balloon. Some fractures can’t be proffered
the tradition broke me. Whole days of hors d’oeuvres & table runners, of forcing my Duchenne smile to keep extended limbs abeyant. Meaning continual nods and guzzled Chianti. Meaning more bathroom breaks with the pill poised under the blade. Sublingual. No shared language, but there’s a reason it’s called family tree: I can read bodies. & shame is the cell that pride pays in kneel/stand ornamentals. Release is the myth that begins as I reenter the world onto sunlit asphalt. A drive across states. I tell my internal betrothed but the logic won’t hold. I’ve nested too far—another holiday. The velveteen in my sleep architecture: rubbed raw
was the match to the flesh, self-inflicted. Was the scaffold. From the pill to the library stacks. To the cells. To slip like a blade into blanket green meant that I’d paid. To lie after belts: that I’d scored. Could count. To count: that a pirouette happened—& no matter that the happening was chrome poor, bent distant—the club had been packed to the gills. The penitent crowded the doors
sick flesh split to white. The proofs ale-drenched on the counter. Strangers in from out of town, lovingly sad. Assuming onto the plastic mattress next to them. Gone is the goal of the dark before. The not yet of too late now past. No easy lay could find me an exit. Every instant play proved its opposite. The night in the bar without a fixed point. The mornings. Split flesh white to the sick. Sometimes the winter sun stitched invisible ice. The couple danced then slept. I dream tree branches into orifice. Nothing comes
no buyer’s guide. Less time in terrycloth, more salt. Several times to the door & several times to the door. I can keep this wig-step going hour by hour if I count. The bright routes skirted. Now refers to time uttered before and aft: blank recto-verso. Agoraphobe. Quiver the sidewalk, egress the fort-da flinch. Soft-nerve my special guest, force the bleared vessel. I can think the pitch is rising or I can stop screaming
