Tell everything to me,
confide without talking
but with hands
& with your words
like stones
         (it cannot come
but by the motion of hands--
that sound made absolute
by an axe striking the perfect
mark in wood)
         Leave me
unfinished, undone, as so
much else around me: the air
a filling for the chest to
heave
         (not knowing, that's
how they went mad--mining
in the dark, blasting through
rock, breaking)
         crouched in the
tiny corners of rooms.
Manic. Phobic. Sexual.
It was all the same
loneliness--going blank
at the middle.
Perhaps that's why they left
out of their minds
their memory, claustraphobic
from the inside
out. It could be that simple--
the tune of their nerves
out of key, slightly,
the snap of strings
         (the perfect
rhythm of an axe-stroke
that shook the fragments
through the seive)
         Abandoned
by a lustre--
less landscape that undid
them without a thought.
Mute, silenced
         (or was it they
who silenced me, with the
simplicity of a gesture)
         It was
easier not to notice how they
scratched holes in their
skulls, in their palms
& at the arch of their
feet, the blinding bullet
like a thorn in their side.
There was an earthquake
going on, everyone calmly
watched cyclones drip
from their tongues. They
would have chewed through
their leashes like dogs, but
they had no bone for teeth.
Their world was one of
flesh
         (and what would they
chew through, but themselves,
biting, gnawing on nails,
drumming their index
fingers on thin planks,
dreaming of something concrete,
drumming a single beat)
         For them,
there were too many endings
without enough exits, leaping
for desserts locked in
snow. They died
with stones in their eyes,
still mining.