Black Like Sins

I.

My tongue stuck in an altar vase,
as I write this. I am wishing you
would grab my thumb,
my blood seeping into your
own fingers. You adopt my
anxiety like a breathless
attack in a shallow bed.

I am just as shallow as her bed now.
What will you do when I make
the Great Switch? What will you
do when I transform from this anvil-
driven cartoon back into a flesh
driven panic attack?
Even the knives looked like
an anvil on a cartoon screen to me.
Maybe that is luck.

When I met you, I was diving
through the universe, splashing
my mind with literature, and you
were a piece of the Great Puzzle
of Humanity, and when we sat
outside and talked alone
for the first time, I wanted
nothing to do with you, studied
you, psycho-analyzed you
into the shallow crevices you kept,

ran my bare foot across the top
of your lagoon, water ringlets
like echoes.

II.

Like the universe, this was not
planned. Our big bang conglomerate
of atoms and sound waves
and existence was not planned
by us, maybe the stars, but not us.

I’m not sure which force drew
me into you, God or Satan,
right or wrong, but I followed
it like a trite children’s game,
a bandwagon of left right lefts,

followed you like a Bible.

And looking at you here in this room,
the universe closes in around us,
my mind a babushka.
We are a layered
Russian doll,
all parts lying open and in a line,
a traffic jam.

I follow behind you in my burka.
Still, I follow you, stand when
you walk like the red words
in your Bible.

Our minds jolt like speaking
in tongues, and as I smile,
ecologies butterflies are attacking
my liver with what
they call fermentation.

It is wild.
It is free.
It is wrong.

Like a Bible,

I have sinned against humanity,
but tell me Gospodin God,
what was I to properly do?
This test, perhaps, of yours,
I’ve failed.

You entered my mind
like Queen Mab in a hazelnut.

I am naked in the gutter now,
fetal position, water running
through my hair, a weak child,
like one who has lost her mother,
arms screaming with bacterial
infections, holes as wide as cigarettes,

And you, you lean toward me
with your own sinful arm covered
in color like a graffitied Chagall,
like a trite Dali.

I barely reach for you—
collapse away from your strength—
you cover the extra
mile between and pick me up,
infected water streaming
over your mural of an arm.

III.

We cannot help but smile when
our pupils meet like Thoreau
and Emerson discussing journals,
mingling polka dots,
small dots of humanity.

Death becoming mute.
Life becoming boisterously loud.

We sit in silence and stare
into each other. It is odd
how safe the silence feels.

It is as though we have emerged
our heads into the ovens
of each other.

IV.

Teasdale, there will come soft
songs that follow this.
I am reminded of that by you,
Supertramp, with your body
corroding along with your fears.

I see you in the woods in that bus,
Alaskan transit, and perhaps
that is what attracted me to you
in the first place, McCandless.

I morphed you into a tramping
genius in my mind,
into a Thoreau incarnate.

That picture of you
on that curb is not McCandless,
though, and you have never
transcended before.

But the silent cabin is overrated.

V.

God is not setting this pen
in motion right now.
Rather, my brainless mind is.

And I will not become silent
here writing about you.

These words are more than language,
more than words patterned
by the alphabet.

Your words enter me with
precision, and I’ve never
felt words quite like that,
never leaned toward
word retraction quite like that.

And I will leave these white
thoughts open, fluid
like Whitman’s barn doors,
democracy seeping through,

Like a never dying lover
in Chagall’s operatic mural,

This poem dying and reincarnating
through decomposition,
resurrecting through trees.
I won’t end it.

God will have to end it.