The Plural of Asphyxia

those who make you breathe against your will
the silent worker bees, crawling each membrane
dancing to no music until the dance becomes old and jolty
a heightened clarity of the human lowlands

you watch the butchering with a keenness
“so that’s how it’s done…”
eyes watching the world moments ago, now
the same as legs, as lungs, heaps of hardened water, now
the same as softened bones

soaking up the smells of the essential
it strikes you: life is a limited-time offer
drowning with each gulp of wind
forced into you

the violins inhaled as they scale
the octaves, halved by a single stroke
that ends in

air

Happy Wildcard Weekend, Everyone

in someone’s head? how silly of Them—the vocalizations were
in the in-animate, the non-pulsating, and mostly what they
were saying, when you boiled it all/all/all the way
down
was ***

we’re falling toward the sky, he explains, but They just wanna
give him more ovoid tablets to make him sleepy-sleepy, arrested
in a permanent drowsy, safe for all the others who may
be accidentally thinking about him

They always request the history of chemicals that have been
donated into her body thusly, but of course she can’t remember;
it’s been an arena of fluid matters counterfluxing each other,
hobnobbing inside her head-box which is really just a window-box
bursting with off-brand poppies, which is really just a jewelry box,
each lacquered layer holding those shiny, tiny comestibles that will
bite every inch of your slippery tenders from the inside

(was join us)

time to get up, They say, rise and shine, rinse and shame; we’ll help
you adjust to your own useless divergence so you don’t upset any of
the ones, including yourself; but all she wants is upset, all she deserves
are these tipping seconds before time teeters and splashes, a break
from the demands of hominids, a looking-sideways at Their world,
the built-up signifiers of secondhand desires and fastidious mud

he’ll not get this respite, he knows, and so the great feather pestle begins
to crush him back into the flickering dust he always was