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The Glutton God
fountain of my blood that starts from everything
will you last past these many machines
and take me back home to my body
before they have stolen the last fragment?
I am watching my people eat the soft flesh of their own oblivion.
I am letting them mow down the trees with their long teeth
like carnivorous fish roaming the air
and I see visions of a young strawberry-blonde girl
standing like a matchstick on an island of dark black plastic
burning with the last pure fire on earth
on a heap of trash miles thick
floating with her thin arms and her flame
of red hair in the Pacific ocean.
when you are still young you see a shadow,
you see a shadow that stays with you
and has stopped roaming,
you see a shadow replacing your first guardian,
you see the shadows of your ancestors spitting sparks
in anger from the mantle of the ground,
you see the razorblade eyes in the mirror
waiting patiently to be born from your body
and hope your hardened vision burns the fog from your life.
may the bones carved so solemnly be made to smile.
may your posture be a flag against the horizon.
the way the trees bend is erotic, making your dreams tilt
with long limbs to draw reproduction from your fantasy.
have I grown cold to love, that only the trees love me?
I want to eat everything in the sea,
to see a buffet table spread out into eternity
like the scissor-cut parade of half-asleep faces
in the barbershop's infinite mirror.
I want to eat everything in the sea.
let the poisons and the healing herbs
flow constantly through me.
when you are still young you see a blade of light,
you see knives fall whispering between the hailstones and the raindrops
in the fog-bound background of the mirror,
you see the centuries of light reflecting back from your face in the mirror,
you see knives of pure light falling through your body
and leaping back up through the trembling floorboards
in volcanic belches, in small volcanic belches
that are called eyelashes in this world.
when you are still young you see the shadows hanging
above your parents on the ceiling
and you know that you can burn
those shadows away from your head
before they stretch across the years
if you become radiant enough.
in the flaking blast of fluorescent lights
in a high shelf of parking garage
built suddenly by many men and moonlight,
you come to yourself in the new body of a split-second,
the little kids who wore your yet-unblemished self
through the thick mildness of fern forests,
before the awareness of the world's larger torments,
before your scars, know where you are again.
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