Bad Faith

Into the bulbous crenelation of foliage I raise my star-shaped

finger. Without softness,

the story perspires a sweetlessness, axillary as any latterday

bubo. Under my clothes, the skin coughs—

it weeps a filthy amber, the color of overused motor oil.

Between myselves, one soul feels too plastic—

but as long as there is at least a gust of light, there will be

some contour, some give, to the others.

The natural world is lobotomized : its hair grows long,

turns to gold, falls away,

and when my skull gets critiqued, rightfully, for taking

after centuries-old copper bells,

it cracks under this stress in the atmospheric night.

No matter which shrub I choose to lie in, I tend to find

another with binoculars right to his eyes, fixed on

some window, a body halted in its frame.

II.

What is an opulent form without a function : or, what is an

adverb?

What is the perfect use of the word needlessly, and what can

I use to dowse for paranoia’s nearest underground spring?

I awaken to the possibility of my having no such hydro-

sphere,

the brighter half of my chiaroscuro egging me to passive

reception.

There is no rhyme fit for my scream :

my scream is ever petty, a sword-crossed, double chiar-

oscuro,

a crosshatching of trusts.

The normative is pedagogical,

but only in high, high relief.

III.

I never skimp on the food I shoplift . . .

but is there a name for slinking away from the inexpensive

perimeter, like this, to the decadent aisles?

And if a tree is named alone in a wood, can it be felled and

dragged to the town square if no one’s around to drag it

there?

There is nothing inconvenient about it, this disappearing,

this falling away of the ground from which an argument

gleans its blinding charm.

I am an individual, thus I have no bedtime.

IV.

To derive my daily intake of sentencing from ought,

my narrative scorn from is,

I first consider illegibility as impossibility, then as joke,

subterfuge, and finally, as foil.

In the interim, I consult my imagination—

a vehicle, anyhow, hijacked by others . . .

Landscapes are without end : nothing can be read, lest reading

become sacrifice.

To rely too heavily on a single language :

to cleave the interval between two.

At the heart of the fingertip’s whorl begins a mouth.

From this whorled mouth a cone arises.

At the base of this mouthed cone there wells up a pressure.

Out of this coned pressure eeks a thread.

With this pressurized thread is tied down a purple.

Under this threaded purple a garishness struggles.

Because of this purple garishness there clots a clotting

In this garish clotting a well is drying up.

And now, dangling in this clotted well :

a bag of urine in sunlight.

VI.

In an instant, I am going to tell you how I rely on things

outside myself.

In an hour, I may have decided to lose myself to the steam

instead.

In a day or two . . . how aberrant

this flipping and flipping . . .

Light that falls and sweeps my last anxiety out over the

water from the cliff’s foot.

The sand fanning out over the plague.

Lapsed, relapsed, prolapsed, eight to nine years away from

that insidious basin at the foot of a waterfall,

in the heart of the crease denoting my opulence.

VII.

If I believe the concept of the ornamental would disappear

given a minor adjustment of attention,

it must be because I sense something essentially ornate in

my own being here :

a chain that ligatures a fire hydrant’s cap

to its open, bursting mouth,

a flier depicting a face that can no longer be recognized as

a face.

Today I read of a name that resisted obliteration—the name

as a site of paradise.

And I read of the name as a frill, under a window in a

labyrinth with a hot, soapy bath waiting at its center . . .

All I ask of life is that it pose me in its question to myself—

like that, my personality can only hit me at a glance.

Source: Pierott's Fingernails (Canarium Books, 2020)