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Eating in Daylight

a wounded person among wounded people,
I go through numbing office buildings
where windows blink like extinguishing suns,
tables and desks are full of slithering hands,
there is no solid presence in my country,
I move like a flame, my hands and my hair are flames
living in immense tides of constant water,
I get sick at the sight of newspapers,
printed lies against the soothing flow of time,
a whole race documenting everything and changing nothing,
keeping a faultless record of useless information,
under the eyes of all children I see
your crinkling skin shining dryly like a white beach,
being ground into the tasteless flour of sand
for a stricken moment when the clock is full
of alien signs and nobody has time to get dressed,

a wounded person among wounded people,
I swim in the coldest fountain I can find,
I dip myself under the skins of ice
found in everything created by human hands
and then resurrect myself with hands of flowing water,
pushing all my human blood out on a shore of marble
and then taking a breath of blood under the weight of oceans,
the hands that slither in seizure on tilted tables
stabilize suddenly and begin to write
with perfect clarity for a day or two,
then scribble incoherently for a decade
before re-forming again in perfect clarity,
the sex felt for the first time with trembling fingers
almost eats into the skin, the mouth dives into any odor
to moisten what it wants and a reassuring hand finds 
a head splitting itself with the desire to please, and calms
the headache that simmers within itself and everything,
the frenzy of two people multiplies the white birches
in the forests that surround their house to guard it against governments
pushing slender arms up through the nights
channeling electricity through human hands,
severing the cords of space and time to become beauty,

a wounded person among wounded people,
I go into places where my eyes are useless so my skin can talk,
into rooms where men refuse to answer my most intelligent questions,
into abysses and heights of soothing ice and dripping suns
where the moons blink feebly like pennies falling down through salt water
where my body is a valley tunneled by a glacier and erupting into a mountain,
and gods refuse to speak in my presence because I want to fight
only with beings more powerful than myself,
I go into abandoned restaurants where the cooks and the waitresses
have walnuts for eyes and drop their bags of money senselessly
on sawdust tables, there are spaces of calm eternity gnawing at me
between the simmering engines in a parking garage or in wide lots
where the lights gleam softly on concrete walls and the decay of stone and skin 
is hidden for a moment in the mellow light of the street,
a time to kiss without moving, where once flames were lit
to keep the movement of night visible and now the force of light coming from
a quaking building sends its shivering branches through wires
into the night where skeletons take too much time
to put on human flesh and by the time they exit their doorways
their footsteps are filled with the scurrying of mice
and cannot keep up with their own decay, the agents of the state are all liars,
there is not one pure man left anywhere near the throne,

I sit on a soft cliff several stories above the city, I stand on waves
above the world, I plan their crashing, my life smells like moss,
my life smells like fresh milk cooling in a refrigerated pitcher,
the dawn of time erupts and demands to be seen in me
even as my ancestors and my offspring plot the end of worlds,
I am a rift breaking loose in the timeline of my own genetics,
my speech is blank as a piece of glass washed up on shore,
being held up by a child to another child's eye,
the trembling growth of forests finds me intangible
standing on a warm road of glistening tar just after the steamrollers pass
and the rains pass and the jungles shake clinging hands off their branches
and the treetrunks peel off their flaking smoldering bark of lichens
on the shining street, a temporary heaven as all heavens are temporary,
there is war in heaven and hell even as I remember to be a child and climb
a tree in a noisy park with a guiltless face newer than the one I was born with,
nothing in this life or the next can be in perfect agreement,
the tamed faces march in and out of restaurants and bars
trying to hide the chaos inevitable, drinks cool the fever for everyone

except one man suspicious of their intoxication in whom the fever boils the drink
and sends it in a tumult back to the surfaces of earth outside his body,
except for one woman who has the eyes of all the animals and all women,
who cannot drink anything but my body
and whose body I can't help but drink,
who has smells of blanketing moss under her armpits
and the soothing smell of fresh cooling milk
coming from the berserk beauty of the prematurely tired
circles under her eyes, one woman among all woman
summons me forth from the peeling forests and the chalk cities
and watches my footsteps hollow on the hollow road,
and leads me to a place where the air is fullness and nothing echoes,
a wounded person among wounded people,
she invites me out of my race and its destruction,
a wounded person among wounded people
I go into her arms and let her touch go so deep
that it transcends all the noises and silences I've heard.

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