Cutting pills in half with a long knife

lying here, Christ, between the wet and breathing purple walls

not a mouth of a lantern or candle at a desk in the basement

office struggling to complete disability paper work that says basically saltwater

guttering in forever, watching a mirror where  my fiancé

towels herself, listening

while something giant swims through the night

waking up medicated again and whacked off

thinking about two pregnant people bonking in old snow

hurrying to gray water, locating herbs that breathe

under the leaves—The gunshot still not finding the fox

on the embankment opposite this house where in sunlight

on the cutting board, royal masses of brain sit splashed in flour

Spike, wrist, noose, tree, hanging weight

soldier lifting the blood corroded

by air on several hills, the small blue bells

of rosemary catching the first

rain, the wind blowing, the cold wind

blowing, let it through—that’s beautiful

in theory—You are all these things, in theory

if everything is married—The continued weeping—the nerves

crushed by fractured vertebrae as the wind flexes

the fine cedar branches before or after

lying in bed reading, sick again

Don’t tell me beauty is symmetrical

it’s a man with multiple eyes married

to a woman with the quills of a porcupine

it’s the lamb warped into a skinny feral dog

with blue-pink forelegs, paws, beautiful goat

guilty of conspiring against the lion, screwing his head

between the prison house bars, an iteration of a green-blue Jesus

gripped by decay, emerging from a sepulcher

that looks like a punched in hive or

the toothy mouth of a beast so

huge the page can’t contain it—Nope, not

quite, it can’t be seen

held—it’s a force, a wind, a ravaging

sustaining—Christ, how close are you to this?

Everything soft, everything bleached under

brush giving way to rain, the compost smell, rendering

petals, rendering not the sun

but coronas on an imaginary lens, rendering

wind, the I wants and I’m weaks, the I did

file the hill into a screw and the tree

into a swan’s neck, magnitude of

raining hard, I laid down by the window and felt such

sweetness, rendering

why and to what or who—such weight

crushes, deranges—knowing

this pleasure will end then, my hands

numb way after I woke to daylight: prayer

a specific weight—it was a party

everyone was there

like the appearance of dwindling

like it all started in a mine shaft

this pleasure—this deer print

in the spillway’s frozen mud

this interval, the moment you pass

through a sieve

one arm sunk into weakness

we grip, as if both slipping

and work our bodies into

each other, this flood

making naked the slope

taking the soil, the sweetness

this woman, her brain uncasing my body

lying down in the clover stream, a child

got beefy enough to punch, wailing

through my abdomen—wondering

if people see a wrecked socket or just a night watchman at the mall

copper wire ripped through

the walls or trees playing video games

all the perverse screaming leaves

peeled apart like a deck

of cards, faces framed in a dead acre of unknown space

collecting white electric dust, outmoded

obsolete, angry all the time—I’m these things, let me also be

your platform, your wind spore, the warmth, Christ

let me be a camera and you the virgin contestant, the dead and the soil

let me be the feeling in your fingers, because I am losing mine

Don’t let me slide into paralysis

I’ll write you more letters, Christ, I will this time

I’ll be good if my hands don’t die—Onion grass

and mud, the steer skeleton chipped into meal

the kudzu and rose, chickory, pokeweed

mayapple—Don’t paralyze me

I’ll be the flattened opossum, the steaming

swatch of maggots dissolving a deer

chicken shit flooding into the sea

Don’t let me slide into paralysis, I’ll be

rolled into a giant missile, the gore forced through

a whale’s spout, in an industrial dehydrator

the pond of clotting blood sprinkled around

tulips to keep them from being eaten, air in the pneumatic punch

creek violet, all improbable wildflowers, particulate

matter in the auto-holy Chinese miners’

lungs and the dust on the needle

descending on your father’s vinyl, that song you

needed to hear to sleep under

one face of the devil—Death

looked like the self in the mirror, growing

like a dilating eye, I know I am fat melted for dogs

vats of brown and purple reconstituted muscle

at your hand, eating blades of grass, lilies

and nematodes, opera houses of mandibles

and frozen ferns, various intersections of

filth, light, the way things move—tangled hair

substrates of shaved, slaughtered neverminds, I am

laughing as the exploded globe

of your expanding integers falls like—We do not

murder that huge ball of pink grasping

hands that turns what it grasps into a new, further, grasping

hand expanding the radius from the center, time

coiled at our feet like a mean rope of neon feces—Is there a way

to convince you I mean what I’m saying?

Spring, last frost on the prairie grass, a friend leaning

in his doorway eating an apple, waiting

for whatever, because if you remove the venom

you kill the man, or all crucifixions

made of cake and fruit, not to mention pleasure

If you are dust drifting through light

not what’s lost, what you lose, moving slow this time

Chew the pill to taste the medicine

load of rivets—what

can be clutched, still soft

let it go like a tropical bird into the late Indiana spring

Tell me how to make things right, Christ

I’ve hurt some people, that’s for sure, trying

a terrifying love though never mugged, fucked, or called out for it

crying between the rows of my leased garden, my good

arm broken, weeds choking the mustard

Tell me what’s right—the horn in the leaves

the first wildflower of the season

pushing aside party streamers like fingers and tongues, waterfalls

of newspapers, and these words decay too

placed on your stone like a lettuce wreath

asking forgiveness for being stupid and weak

Forgive me for being stupid and weak

I will offer what is healed O Christ! O Beast!

Forgive me for asking to heal