The sky was fire, sweat stains seeping decades old mattress, confess it was my grandfather’s house, the home of my mother, home of her estranged sister, stomping grounds of my uncle, same spectrum as me, same as me, alien, frothing, bitten by the silence of schizo bred dream. Maybe it was the heat it was the heat the heat or the seizure light outside the window, something watching when no one’s there. My ex-wife was snoring, curled like an innocent drunk, could she have known that a river grows a canyon? Known that bears can stalk for miles (though I’m sure I’ve heard otherwise, that their soot- black noses scour for campsites devoid of the living, I’m sure I’ve read that somewhere)? First, a kind of waking trance straddling brain and bend, brook and stem, chasm of imbalance, becoming. Unfolding, fractals descended over crust-brick walls, crawling, climbing chip-cracked trellis, knew my name, knew my name, my hiding spots, knew the old place in Erick. It was red all red, everything crimson bleed, firestorm, ember, screeching owls engulfed in hook-horned inferno — I was awake I was awake awake curtains drawing themselves, breath on the base of my neck, murmurs, then murmurs, then red, more red, then hunger, mouth-wet, hunger for meat, for black, for kill, the thrill is wrong, I saw what I could do, could choose, it wanted, I wanted peel like brown-rot banana, like snakeskin littering floor, and they wanted, always wanting, always reaching for hands, not my own, metal, acrid incarnation, cessation, incarceration, I don’t want this, I don’t want what I want, don’t want any of this, but I can’t turn away, channel won’t change into something, not this wreck of bodies staining the ground, the sound of dead, then red, it’s not me anymore, anymore, I can’t tell, they’re listening, my cell is tapped, the pine is full, He was there biding his time at the end of the bar, tar steeping glass, no intent of paying, of saying “saved,” then red, it was all red, red red red red, but I woke, shed my skin, hid in a bin of rind, I’ll deny everything without my lawyer here, you can’t make me say anything anything I haven’t already said, but you knew, didn’t you? In the past, they called it possession, prescribed a white-collared priest to rip festering tooth, sinew snapping unhinged salvation, but this is just a phase, a haze of mustard gas, they’ll pass if I paint the blood just right, then night, I’ve got a bundle for kindling, bind them in bouquet, wormy stems snipped for vase, but they’ll take root anyway, they’ll take it anyway, any way I look, it’s me all the way down, the sea, the sky, the dawn, he’s eating fawn in fields of stink and sour and rot, it’s me in here or him, me and him, see, we have it all planned, I’ll set the stage and he’ll act it out, take a bow, a bow, the bough before they know what we’ve done, know what we’ve done, done, no red, no red, no red then dead, inside, inside is me, the sea, the surf, he’s plastic, rhyme, and dirt, he hurts, same as me — my uncle used to play cards with me in the same room like destiny was licking its chops before I was hungry, before it was red

Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
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