.....

I come to you disheveled from a feverish life,
guardrails in my collarbones
barely holding my blood together
birches and pines rising on each side,
the thrum of a loading truck in the cage of my groins

I no longer want to see the masks of profit
the intoxications of slow death
drizzling down the sides of great architecture
or the burden of humanity carried by the social life of cancer;
I want instead the mineral hearts, the marrow's faint speech
as bodies give voice to one another
to pendulum centers of gravity

the sobbing that has no journalism
and the jeremiads of the thwarted
that crown our kingdomless ascent,
and a small dark woman who takes my bruised mouth,
coiled vine of my lips to the faint arc
of her fruitful belly, inked with the slogans of necessity
road pale as a knife's wink
through the cunt of the penetrant hills