1.
What have you wrote upon my skin,
that beam where dozens crossed$%:
The parts you flung lie all about,
the clutter of my wanting waist
four-quartered - and though I lied,
I met your blade, you did me in.
Your knife's brown claim has staked this room
for all I've done, or not -
where you've reached, deposits grime you -
a cuff limed red, inked through, blood-sopped:
and I am rent where hunger holed me,
from stem to stern laid all about,
locked into death as to this room
where still I lie, unreasoned.
Buckled now by ripping's sour meat,
you'll simply disappear -
yet I'll not be loosed from the bone
till morning comes, and finds me done.
2.
Where you've bypassed, that's the end game:
I need whole facts to get the wanting right,
to codify where cracks aren't papered shut.
It's a system, laid in a cellar, it has self-reference.
We can code ourselves, risk is what's named -
measured in the stewed deeds, anointed
and sounded in the palate where the horror sounds.
What's been coming$%: What has the chest
and the sluggish blood served to create,
this bone tourniquet, this darkened lid
closed on a widening maw$%: We divide and
bluntly gob out artifice, we rub seam on seam,
tighten ends and wrap the shuttered ball alive.
Creeping here we have the gall / to split.
3.
It ran the length of all the life you'd had
the day they splayed you spatchcock at the slab,
deboned you, sheared your skin and plugged
the misplaced hole that caused your heart to jump.
They left their mark - eight inches and a part
of you embossed, discoloured, neatly scarred
between your breasts where all who could, could see -
yet you'd not change, would leave it be.
A cleft is what divides us in our lives
in different ways, and what is whole survives
reduction to the scars we barely own -
these knotted parts, scraped points that mark the day
the waters rose, and did not bear away
but polished us instead, until we shone.
4.
palate cut
shin-bone barked
wrist drip-limned
finger burnt
knuckle gouged
axilla line
eyebrow flecked
kneecap drained
thumb flesh scorched
nose-bridge bust
thigh dog-bit
elbow knocked
ankle chipped
wristbone slashed
coccyx jarred
forehead caught
I sleep awake
and find it in
the darker parts
the sodden trace
a heart maligned
or misaligned
a space cleared out
to suck its last
in agony
and in good faith
the angles left
abashed, preserved
the flesh love leaves
in you, the urge
abroad at last -
thin want's awash.
5.
A thorn-bright hook where you'd crept in
had dragged my gut up through my mouth
:%$amp; barnacled you to the fault
I hoist you from. A standard slip,
and yet I hauled you through the parts
where I hungered, reduced myself
:%$amp; frayed the club I frailed you with -
you ran me off,
you prised the rot out from the gum.
The blossom of the lack of you had spread
throughout the heart-hung inner -
I skinned and scoured your traces where
they stained - a bludgeon for a scalpel
and the thud of a hide-bound hammer
were all it took to caulk the tripe
I found in me. The rest was torched,
and I stood awhile to warm my hands
on all the sound and fury.
When body burns, the bone remains -
a structured fragment in the ash
is pestled hard but still remains.
The urn holds bone until the last -
but now I've shucked you from my own
there's no amount of grinding
that's to take - what's done is done,
the wen of you reduced to nought,
your pulse long dried beneath my skin.
6.
My mouth's gum-arch and fulcrum knot
has had me gagged;
the sound transmuted and replaced
or twisted at the palate's line,
hawking intention while it gutted me
in the places where my will was in rout.
Who's not diminished by a loss
becomes its heir - rendered trace it yet remains,
reshapes, appends.
Scarred where wounds have been closed,
we do not live from hand to mouth
but draw on what has been before -
they sewed me up, and where they stitched
they made me whole. A clotted mass
I tongued and tongued,
a scabby thread that reached to books,
that reached beyond the hand :%$amp; mouth
to human learning, human gain,
and what it changed, it left the same.
It's this I stumble on recounting
what I recall of my history -
for all the life I feel and feel,
I'm made of what they learned:
I am made of learning.
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