Nassau

man covered by a wool blanket. sits on the ground. under a series of nails. pitchforks. spades. soiled pants. suspended in space.

I do not want to be heard, I want to be rasped, with shard-studded sleeves, jute and horsehair, to be deaf down to my sphincters so that my thing hanging down head first be hell for whoever goes there scattered, babe-battling tongue to tongue, subject-verb-saint-petroleum plastering my club-footed face to burn the books that stink of sage. I want to see my answer to every question bleed on a public totem for gnawing, a puddle on the ground wider than a gaol, my sixty-six nebulae afloat in it, so that the tablets of medicine and power may rise before you and silence the testaments. So the ashes may sing in a and b minor, so ketamine can taint the blood of Scottish lambs, turn into a discourse that chokes, thins out, sections, so that we lap it all up because drama, salvation, confession must. But truth means no, I want the remains, manure operating, ash trees growing through truncated fingers, I speak of lives in the mouth, flying masonry, I wish for the ram to digest the heart. From bed to world, an epistle is being written level with the petrol beneath joy and without me and it shames itself from mark to mark in a hunting shed. So that it is said: all the anniversaries of the idiot in bloom are mine now, and if I am ugly in a simple man’s robes, it is so that I may become a stag and sleep on my hooves in Ovid’s eleventh elegy.