My bathroom remains the only place I'm ever naked
Smashing soap in to my hands each morning.
The shower throat all belching there behind me
Bloated with my shed-skin riddance.
And one non-restroom away
My blinds clench up on the California sun
Setting fire to the dust and possible day pull on my apartment and I.
A genuine fear of where all this sleeping leads has got you thinking thin
About what you would and wouldn't do to survive.
You would not dig for a fresh, wet wishbone in a still-kicking chicken's chest.
You would not dissolve small slices of unraveled arm under your tongue.
You'd maybe kill the power to your hand,
But that's about it.
Really.
You know the razor for your face cannot cut kids from your male animal abdomen.
You were not born the moment your stomach was finished,
Your one wing plucked,
Eyes half-filled,
And wild yolk, like so, sliced in to a since.
So I ask you:
Have you ever really had a hand fall off?
Or found your mail main in your home
Eating one of your new poems
Holding a knife to your bills?
Half-swallowed a screen you can't cut and still keep all the juice in that opened up arm by tightening the ropes of your digital watch?
You will grow no ghost to leave this angst to.
And this no-ghost will wear no locket for the safe-keeping of your fear
To dangle like a heart
So it may always and forever hear the gulping throats of all your stopping drops of blood.
Like this was something beautiful
When compared to your red skeleton.
Like you say:
You've asked nicely for your arm back.
Except...
Every time the sun leaves you alone on a far curve of the planet
You think you feel the whole slung six pounds of your cartoon heart
And all its irons
Tugging drugs toward it.