This tendency towards analysis is: an ally & sister, for I'm not
so much a soft young dream that I can't
drown in thoughts like knives,
holding the words together in damp constellations.
A wire stretched from branch to branch. It will bind wrists
and it will cut clay.
It will slice through that motorbiker's
exposed neck,
that spinal wreck,
oh yes.

They tell me I need to stop cutting the world
down to size.

That I need to stop over
thinking. (and I
think,
yes. I have to throw away my apple.
I have to drop the knowledge kink.
Because maybe this
is what absolute stillness feels like,
maybe this is death. Fractals are tricky things.
Cataloguing the infinite that curls into the finite like
a flower, a seashell, intestines, a soul
makes me so tired. I don't have energy left for the finite
that seeds infinity, that human capacity to fall asleep facing the stars.

And I keep thinking it until I run out of dehydrated metaphors
and then I move on to a complete consideration of irony, vis-a-vis, with respect to
my shaking hands.)

I wish I wished, as a frightening child,
that someone'd ******** me senseless
or export pints of my blood
to dying countries, lace my brownies, lace my dress, my hair,
marry me, impregnate me, inspire me.
I want to have wanted
some hideous distraction, impervious before my picks, incomprehensible
'beautiful because it's a mystery', the feeling's called, I couldn't say;
to have wanted a magpie soul, an ineffective beak.

But honestly?

Honestly: passion and life and love in my mouth --
if I had teachers they were piss-poor teachers, they instilled
no such desires here. They gave me
a microscope.

Honestly?

I want peace, quiet, goggles, fire. I'll wed the hour
the clocks stopped and
freeze-dry you all;
I'll dissect your hearts as
happily as Herodotus's dead.