25.05.012 Nightmare Foam

Every toe planted with obsessed precision,
walking the edge of a knife;
rote words spoke in unison:
every voice inside my head, every word
in chorus, in crimson.

I breathe a frenzied life
into every particle of assigned meaning:
phoneme, syllable, word;
every sentence a deadly battle strategy.
Every war, won.

I am Alexander. Your blood seethes
in a nightmare foam between my teeth;
froth I breathe
in and out on the daily;
pink,
bitter metal-tang.

Pupils like black saucers.
Nostrils dilated;
heart beating with alacrity.

One reason is all I need--
your lazy speech enrages me.
Alkaline lightning sears through my veins.

Mine is a fury. Mine makes me free.

Cassiopeia

I have a leak, my head has a leak, my mouth has let slip
so many words, tumbling out of me like water from stone,
like sand through my hand: over fingers, to fill the negatively-charged spaces between;

I have almost no words left. The precious few are recycled, over-used tarnished

garbage,
sea-spewn foam; mermaid-souls throttled and beaten over rock interminably.

Had I the words which fell,
fell out of me
to form pools of wet memories and warm lather for the birds which fly 'round my head
(my brow's feather-beaten, my eyesockets-- pecked clean,
diseased, laced with flies
and caked in rust
[encrusted Nightmare of Hot])----

Had I caught the words
(which poured, poured out of me)
in kitchen saucers, pans or papers
(oysters slickening silty syllables)----

I'd lay my claim to deeper waters,
or to servants indentured forever instead.
O Cassiopeia, beleaguered
for better by Poseidon's worst intentions----

How you hang, how you weep about as you call
your own-- O, Daughter-- back to you
from your captor's watery hovel:

The moon, she tries, but----
there you hang still.

(No ash black enough to antithesize;

from which these pinpoint-lights might rise.)

radiation brain-hum

schlepping, disgusting
indiscriminate self-
promotion.

cancerous, unerring
warmth of spirit;
dimness of intellect;
you have tantrums

and you seek my attention.
and i have nothing but my ignorance to give to you.
nothing to be said; rather, silence.

not a single bit of re-cognition
in my own head,
and on my face. you are

a species to be studied; you are not me;
i see nothing of myself beyond my first fifteen.
and yet, you appear all the happier.

you are protean and languid;
bombastic, maladjusted--
and yet, and yet:
you've no-
one to acquaint with.