handsome und greeting

now Hans’ eyes glitter, now rheum, now vitriol, now glissando; Greta now greeting mops them all up. the waxed lacquer glistens, full of his eyes and their rhymes; is a meniscus of shed things, things best not named after all.

their names are exoskeletal, are bone husks and rebar bent cunning all over what is in the end an indiscriminate pulsing.

—o—


now Brittney slips slickly from the town car, flashing her immaculate gorge. the day so humid it drips and the crowds aswarm around her are silhouettes with LED stareyes. everybody drops to their knees, hands upraised clasping at the cloying sweetness she proffers. glossed and not at all sticky, even in this heat. she Speed Stick, she pH-balanced.

even now she is ascending to a kewpie doll heaven.

—o—


no matter how we claim now smoking is the way. the past still reaches out its tarry hands and throttles us; from the inside out; this is the virulence, the contagion. we fear. we H1N1. April comes in like a virus; October finds us compost heaps.

—o—


now Hans and Greta settle down for the 5 o’clock news. in the flickering wash of indigo Greta dreams of teeth, or a mouth that beats upon itself until its teeth are porcelain shards.

Hans dreams of breath, and or the rinds of bread blooming bluewhite in the moist and needled dark.

in the corner of the living room
a woman rocks upon a creaking chair, counting the snowfall of her hair, sucking a shaft of crystal candy; pink ridges of her gums rupture, quietly, as the anchorman mutters, soft, urbane, of the two that fell from an ultralight plane in the bluegreen pines of the Oakland hills tonight.

her dreaded hair walks like spiders up the wall. now Greta and Hans smile down the 5 o’clock new


—o—

it is only flesh furl; slow pearl-dewed and lunar flesh wound; man—i—cured; it’s only LED eyes that make it; only the un-stained, the immaculate cloth …

it ratchets open; it ratchets open its cunning mouthparts, its delicate gloved bone; it armatures of cartilage and nerve, pieta-arms webbed with lucent spittle

and screams

revealing what white
what Holy
wood
what Zoom® whitened smiles

—o—

they trickle godsweat, through latex fingers, through glass retorts, through slender vessels where a curled rodent grows—a single, cartilaginous wing, wrinkled as bat nose and just as tenderly wriggling, unbreaking wave of flesh poised to scoop up ripples that ride the breath—in the godsweat steep, the afterbirth of dreams—two tender fibers intertwine and write, are cellseethe and benign, parthenogenesis of timeless sleep—in the night the bioluminescent dogs do wimperwrithe, cavernous nostrils dilate wide, catching iron tang of flesh upon the wind—out of the corners of your eyes—their skulls, the chambered nautili, secrete another calcine, windsilk rind—Hans lies wakeless, a shuttling between impossibilities; in her dreams Greta has chainsawed the last, the last log, and scrapes a flare of sulfur—as every inch of her goes nerveless

—o—

we were doing it; at last we were doing it, were doing it for something sacred; for something sacred and so the woundflesh ground, one against the next; the coarse flesh sobbed and sawed against and all our loose ends

our tickling black threads were drawn out and out again; hung limpid and useless
waiting for us to fall back to ourselves again, in damp sweat and hollowed pant

waiting for dawn again