We, finally

capture the yoke that unlocks the cathedral. I’m not honey, I’m a gag in the. Carnal, carnival sun-drenched, scavenged throat of worship. What idols we placed there are not golden. What idols we placed there can only be flesh. What idols we placed there refuse to be flesh. Aren’t the great Jonas-bellied rafters far too much like the scaffolding over the train I’m still outscreaming, across & cross the river, hoarse as the fastly pinkening expanse you can’t hear now, but feel like a soundless thunder rumbling a dry sky.

They refuse to be flesh

Cross the river & my chest, four-pointed star that will not regenerate. It means nothing, it means less than. What god have you found worth believing, you: who believed. & where our hungers met: fields within fields burn, houses within houses. The paint at the windows curls until a landscape, collapsed. My jaw, singed, stark at the chorus & I wouldn’t let them scrub the char away. This is my face now. Chalk screeching down a bald board, mouth melded to mouth melded to—

& you should have to look at it, but you don’t. 

& I had to use a hacksaw to unclench my fist

& the rain streaked the ash down my neck until I was so stark, so far from recognition, I could only be beautiful, (finally.) until I was lit up like a cockeyed skyline & if I told you the rain doesn’t get inside anymore I would be lying but the truth is we enjoyed lying to each other very much but the truth is I won’t let anyone pour you from me & I ate the pale bells stem first, to swallow the silence we peeled back from the idols that had us nearly convinced they are not flesh, from the idols that don’t get to refuse but they do, baby, that’s all that they do.

The wirelike toothless blade

any addiction favors, honed a tongue singular as any such debasement. Such as, we fled my father swearing at the tv, the howling all around us made certain people stop touching us at a young age certain people start at a younger & all along we thought the sky was supposed to be that green. Such as I gargle yellow number 6 until I’m foaming at the first memory I have in a fit of drag & if you’ll just be happy now I swear to the god that doesn’t live inside my head, I would pull you back here, through the night so barbed with vision as the day, through the day unseen as the howling no one hears or, we lie & lie & lie, pulling green from the roots, all the way back to—                                            just to do it myself.