We have all wished to be covered // After everything explodes

In Texas a Baby is Born Without Skin.

We have all wished to be covered.

You dare air. So there are surgeries

for you. Peach fuzz. Leather.

A hardcover's dust jacket. We try growing some 

for you in the lab. 

Underneath the carpet 

lives a kingdom of dust. You sneeze.

And in an old house

the roofslates keep sliding down

while we worry that the sky is falling. 

The sky is falling. 

A landlocked country celebrates this,

their hands upturned to the rain, their prayers

answered. The sky

is falling. Above the Arctic circle

a hole grows in the ozone. Its air is pretty. 

Beneath it, the ice glitters wetly. A wound. 

You cry. You are packaged by nurses.

Your organs are canvassed by bandages. 

Your colours bloom like a cracked mirror.

You are opened. You are three-dimensional.

We sink our hands into you. 

There is something inside you, 

and there our eyes are 

swallowed. A beaten samurai's blade

finds himself and his colours too bloom.

Like you, he is opened. Was it choice,

to find oneself peeled? Was it your hands?

When you were packaged by your mother,

where were your hands?

What were your hands?

Where were your hands before this air seeped

into your fingers? And the hurt, from where

this roaring hurt

of knifeless cuts, of groundless scabs

fresh with falling? Where

were your hands before you were 

first found, glittering and bloodless

as a seashell? 

You were waiting. Tinned.

A sonograph questioned your contents. 

Then beneath your mother's legs,

strange shore,

your small feet waded. You leap.

You are born and on the news.

***

Will Everything Be Okay In The End?

After everything explodes or

after everything implodes when

all seven planets line up

perfectly together straight and

bugs transform into bigger bugs and

begin eating children and

embryos rip out of wombs with 

baby nails like talons and 

my head ceases 

its clouds, heavy and weird and 

grey-- After all of this, will everything be

okay? The missiles, will

every one of them making their way 

steadily into intergalactic 

atmospheres of war, will they turn

into birds instead? And jobs, will there be

enough for everyone because robots,

so clean, so ready, take 

Mondays through Fridays off to write

poems instead? In the end, 

will everything be “alright” or “just fine” or “it’s no big deal” or be 

glitterier

or just “meh”? Whatever

screams or silences of screams, will they become 

like music, or like the memory of music

and be resolved into floating, like air, like struggles

of vapour after kettles, or like children

blowing into plastic circles, soapy

with effort-- And there. The blowing goes

as spheres as crystals

as long as seconds before 

the quiet bursts. 

A Blue Song/Wine Poem/Kaguya.

A Blue Song.

Oh yes, but this song is for empathy. For the grasses'
leaves' greens being yellowed. For when winter 
says, "Hello": A song as this might add to its start with an opening
chord or two. Oh (yes), but this song is for me: Hello.
A greeting is an affirmation of one thinking thing
to another. I greet stones. Tie them to my feet when
I jump into my own blood. Drown for a bit. Wait
for a response. The stones don't say anything. Flowers
do sometimes, inspiring a heart to do a little lilt
within itself. So much to speak of about flowers: Thick yellow grasses
swirling around like the sounds swirling within a severed ear.
That's a good painting.
But that painting is yellow. Blood is red. Water is
blue, or the sky is
blue, or our minds make them
blue, so where should I jump? Upwards towards the birds
or downwards towards the fish? If human embryos look like fish
then wombs might be oceans, but amnion fluid is yellow: Like
sunflowers. Was Van Gogh a yellow man if he had a gun? And am I
blue because words
sometimes sing?


Wine Poem.

Go, small song. Make yourself
known. Stretch your arms as sunlight,
glow. We humans’ leaves’ greens need you,
so, will you love us as our ears do you?
Wonder with me, throat, as you say
your notes and lengthen their dull to
soft nevers. The crowd still hears you
tomorrow, the last song before the final
closing of the eyes before godless sleep.
Coffins vibrate with your enthusiasms,
corpses know remorse, finally, like a
cracked ancient bell with some something
left. String me as niggers
screaming in pillow fields. String me
as hazardous Lazarus sinewed neck-string
plucked as flowers, as slave-ships docked
upon the shore with gentle endless thud. We’ll
keep singing spirituals forever, we’ll keep
saying things about skin. We will win. Win
like mirrors lastly seeing smiles. Come with me
as stars die and are still witnessed. Inscribed
as pride in a mother’s voice with small
black boy joy, with tears, first cries, blood,
water
and the mother’s song mountain-heavy
and living.

Kaguya.

friend, I'll miss you     like a plastic water-bottle in an ocean

floating away, emptied of message     like hollow mouths somehow

making some work of our tongues’ clay    this shape, that,

     a word

or two, some drinks as well gliding down the canals of

our throats, the same chambers of breath, of the grey

inhalations from the paper-white cylinders we burn

     I say I only smoke on special occasions, so, you

when we take the paddle-boat in the park and the ducks'

brass laughs are knowing, I

spin us around in circles as my

other hand is a little stronger when I

try to push us forward     I'm

sorry, I'll

miss you like water in a bottle trapped by its lid

     turning into air in the sun, then whose gas will hit

     its plastic walls and then return to dew, I'll miss you

like that, I'll

miss you like how the Great Books school you go to feels

     of where we were then and where we were now which,

     no matter how much chance, the pictures poured into

     our palms through our pens— beaming now from crystal squares

     with which we take our photos— are still seen by our eyes:

remember our eyes, I'll miss you

like that, I'll

miss you like when the big man upstairs said

    the "darkness here and the light there”

    and when to see that already the world was created

    into two– a generous deep split branching out forever

    into a meeting point we can only assume

    is somewhere behind us and behind our eyes—

    is to be inside oneself — you would never

    smash up your head like that, would you?

    just for the nerves of it? — and when

    to hold yourself and to see that pink decay of yours

    filled with memory and now several smokes

    is  prayer I'll miss you like that I’m sure, there'll be

    whole twittering stretches of string-song like bird muscle

    to say so, but that pink thing in your head   I won't miss you,

 no, not like that. I'll

do this now then    when I think of

     you

I'll feel the thing in my chest    like

     you

I'll look for a song that looks    like

     you

to match this thing in my chest and

     you

won't suddenly appear and I'll pretend that that

     you

is good enough because it won't be

    (     )

my friend, I'll miss you like the paddle-boat spins, and the wood

of the boat against the wood of the dock, and

our hollow mouths sounding and our feet finding earth.

Poem.

You see everything and then it is gone: lightning

in a dark moonless night: you before everything

it all happened at once and then never.