arid, mother's hands
bled from where the skin meets the nail,
cut and purple like those who
drowned in our sink.
Every time she looks at me,
fawn to hunter,
God closes his fist and drops
her dead - amen.
if only
just for something to say,
little things we do
mean
nothing
or
protrude like an elbow splinter;
qualms now a-
rest among the lost
sheep
and sleep,
I have grown tired of this like a deadman bouquet -
the story of he who rose
and wilted too soon
but I have not given up;
no, I cut the noose
when I was ready to live
yet sacrificed nothing
less than a dignified
response
to questioning existence.
This is fucking nothing.
You don't need to get it
or understand
how I compose myself
with an Achilles heel too shot
to feed meaning
in vain like all the junk I've taken
to heart wasn't enough.
It's my greatest lie, a poem
to end
every poem
when I have given up on all the schematics,
fuck it all
I don't have time to shed your skin,
it can't fit my shrunken hope anymore,
the sheep parades down
a broken alleyway
as a wolf; I butchered myself
because it's better to be half-man, half-
human than it is to wear
out the heart on my sleeves
if I want to (scatter) parentheses like dead animal carcass
because I am just too tired
to bury what wasn't mine
in the first place,
you'll become a rotting example
of bastard poetics.
I would turn to sonnets if it wasn't for
Shakespeare and alcohol.
Then again, you aren't
any better with a head full
of haiku like stabwounds
in full bloom.
being imperfect,
ugly, beautiful, imperfect, repetitive
gives me mother's
amnesia, but you had already
forgotten me like what it feels
like to sketch a self-portrait
into the left breast
in case the mirror hasn't
faired you well.
here's a word of wise
to the deaf -
I can be as wordy as you but I shut my mouth
if the barrel needs clenching.
I inherited her scars,
the kind of smile you can slit wrists to;
you can't teach an old dog new tricks
if you're about to kill it.
I was better off
lost and bloodied anyways
until now,
all I've felt was haiku this,
ballad that, double-talk
but as of three minutes ago
I decided to alphabetize my thoughts
should a nursery rhyme of
slaughtered geese
at the hands of a mother
be read by someone's
bloody fingers.
Read these scars like braille,
motherfucker.
This does not need
nor want
an ending like euthanasia,
candy-coated and commoditized
(parentheses)
but for the amputee's applause,
I'll give them letters
illiterate and scraped into the sockets
'cause it's hard to see past
a name-tag and smile.
This is the poem
to end
all poems.
Hush.
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