Poem with Suffering

alone, upstairs, the spirit worked
‘til extinction—the body blanking

out by its own grammar

“you”—“you teach
your hands” with your hands

by the dayskin by nightskin you are in

as something as light as eternity
smears a look on your screenlit face—

if only the “virtual”—
but the virtual—the “real”—which?

unblessed, tumid, blue year:

you become yourself in spite of yourself

Winter in Place of Spring in Place of—

lapsed passwords, sleeping pills,
warm compress to the stone whisper
cyst bulge, ache.

A house is like a house on fire.

In a dream I lose
my teeth and in a dream I piss
into the still-blazing embers of fire.

The last grape of consciousness is devoured.

The greener days among the greenest seem identical.

Outside the earth is a scorched, blackened ball.
Inside here there is no news at all.