A spiralling ascent
Along the world's edge
Sweatdrops fall
To a below without sunlight
Boot dust
Llamas labour under supply packs
Hoof beat lantern dance
Shadows cast on the cliff face
Distorted we loom
Above the mute fog of humanity
Summitous
Awash in the final dawn
The old Inca smiling sprouts his knife
Ancient tapestral landscape
Exhales into us
Curvously infolding
The old Inca holds out his hands
The knife cuts horizontally
Reality opens like a book upon a tabletop
There, he says,
Pointing to the infinite space between where the sky in the past met the land
Timespace lies like a discarded washcloth
And we see dimly through the mists—
There, he says,
Pizarro could not follow us,
And we see dimly through the mists—
The neon lights of
Neoqusqo

The mountain grows much slower than your perception of the mountain growing taller, as the dynamics of the sea, which sculpts the earth beneath your feet, speaks—summoning the breeze: isn't it surreal, living on God's pottery wheel?

From the eleventh floor
the world looks small
and possible

The cars
     black and white
     parked perpendicular
          to the curb
     parallel
          to each other
are keys
     ebony and ivory
    
I reach out
through the window
and play the street like a piano

Among the hideous shapes
   you are my favoured
For the wretched silence of your scoliotic spine
   flavoured with our crimson wine:
Blood diamonds
   screaming songs of sirens
   writhing on a desiccated island's edge
Boiled alive—
   can be distilled into the language of a pledge
I hereby promise to be yours
Foretell you will be mine

Stick your knife into my crown,
Slice down to the chin,
Dig your fingers in,
And unwrap the skull within.
Stretch and dry this ****** leather,
Draping it over a conical framework of bone,
Ends glued together or sewn,
Next: sever
The skull from the spine,
Polish to a shine,
And ***** into the base of your lamp,
Plug in: electron flow illuminating my mind,
Aglow with ideas
Of a submission radiantly divine

a curious family of raptor children, a lake of caterpillar carcasses (boulder soup), a grocer for the taliban, gas powered anything, the exposed midsection of a tree, bank robberies or bear maulings in progress, triangles, an irascible bus driver thinking in isosceles, the itinerant story of a mama mammoth, starquakes and extinctions, massive roaches, a neck bath in hot breath, sudden abeyance from behind, the way gravity kills caterpillars and spares us because all angles of gravity make 180 degrees and this is stillness. fear running a straight line from behind us, through us, and in front of us. what i consistently get caught up in, the third point might be my final resting. this is why i ******* hate triangles.

i waited for you to

deposit bumble bees down my

throat with your mouth

they will safely disarm their stingers

and bring them all to me in a square envelope

‘shake it’ i tell you

the stingers become the poem i wanted to write

a really lovely one that tells you you’re a campfire warming my nose

that you’re pretty


it isn’t all roses though

it feels thorny somehow

yeah, i say, ‘i meant to take those out’


my throat and limbs are

fuzzy i say

but you find this, contradictory

the creature has noticed me. it has thousands of broken legs on its face and keeps tabs, never wasting an hour without checking in, watching my home grow bigger in the corner. i am a long bodied cellar spider, suspended, inverted beneath the guitar case, just right of the bed frame. food is scarce, but i sense we share this hunger in the humid subterranean habitat. it takes on thinness, shakes at times, makes day into night, flips pages, tele-spells, turns night into day again.

micro-fibrous dust settles on my spinnerets, a twitchy sneeze draws attention, the cruelest of details. while unraveling undaunted one pseudo-day sort of night, a pulse was released comma intent to ****. it came like resolute qualia, something my eight eyes can’t see. the plastic cave, the broken allegory, all ghastly and converging. as soon as the web gets jostled, a switch will summon my stunning epileptic display. i am ready to give it a leg, but only from the calve. it has never come this close.

you wanna take a guess? you wanna take a guess at this? guess nice long and hard. take a second guess if you need one. it’s ok to second guess. in fact, i insist you take another and keep guessing because guessing is smoke. in this tight circle, we’re taking guesses.

i am an educated guesser.

bummed guesses for awhile. bought my first guessing glass one July. play the guessing game all my days and guess my days away. they make guesses into the same thing as candles and its spiritual. it feels like taking an infinite number of guesses in one breath.

your guess is as good as mine.

drop to the next level. it is the doctor’s thesis of guessing. It is conjecture and formality, but with the fractal reasoning of a true American pack of guesses. they’re the guesses at the end of something replete. the last guess you have left.

out of guesses.

There is a string of panic tied to the last guess, which we tuck, flip, hide in the bottoms of cardstock caverns. when the time comes to draw the last straw,

B. there is nothing to guess at but a missing paycheck. These are the only answers we ever get.

A. she is there, all smiles and fresh questions with a bunch of guesses. she is my best guess yet.