windstorms and labwork

afflatus, inflatus, my morning globe,
as lithe as your impermanence.
and home! dread homes! are rabbit dugs,
spoonholed piles of mexican brick
where nothing ever touches down,
nothing here alive receives
the plains’ poor offering of gypsy light,
the ugly wind that meets the mudline.

[metaphors]
1. a mottled fence
2. and how these storms hold faceless teeth
that slat their eyes through butter-wood
then purge their guts on wintered florets
4. some freshly headless nativities,
their polyethylene skirts upturned
from violent sacks
5. and knowing i’m a souless
speck

             i lick at what is manifest
        beneath your hair
   each poison tab
a colour
acid
fire
  or lake
     a brothel
         and religious studies

i know, i know you never mean
to murder
or complete
me

but do not say “live for yourself”.
i’ve come online to see the god
that came before me.

we are so poorly married
like bookend spines of Plath and Hughes
up on the shelf
are somehow
synonymous
with love.

i’m left to my device too well,
belonging like the secret bedrock
or saplings, stoned,
hung over streams
which do not bend into your wake.

my phlebotomist believes
in what she takes,
lords in her tubes

so i am something, yet,
perhaps in tiny pieces.
i say to them:
you lay like art,
you can almost live
in words.