Your mother has a beautiful cunt
after Henry Miller

I want the world to scratch itself to death,
where everybody’s giving birth to something
they’d rather lock in the cellar than feed.
All the beds are crawling
and the table tops blink
like giant turtle eyes.

Anxiety thrives in the lampshades.
What if your mother was a Parisian whore,
harvesting fly eggs from her nipples
like coagulated milk,
and you knew that’s how she nursed you?

The Parisian streets are a confluence of cunts.
If time is a cancer then love is a leper
asking for a French kiss in exchange
for a poem, and a poem is just a penis
erected from words.

My poems made me pregnant.
I walk around with my belly exposed
and distended,
burping with poetic indigestion,
all these stanzas squirming, kicking.

This collection will be the last collection,
the poetry to end all poetry,
a leviathan of sunsets, lilac blooms,
broken teeth and hearts the size of moons
all stitched together
like Frankenstein’s cadaver,
hand out, begging for a companion.

Maybe all women are masochists.
I imagine your mother’s cunt
still smelling like your delicate baby head,
her flower petals pushed wide
and welcoming as a fontanel
pressed inward by probing fingers
placing puzzle pieces in the brain.

I imagine your mother as a Jewess,
kissing the shrine between my legs
while asking my opinion
on the conflict with Palestine,
her mouth like string of code
bolstering the strength of the Iron Dome,
while outside infant body parts
rain down from the sky.

Your mother tells me she loves me
then pickpockets my jeans,
leaving me penniless in my sleep.
The night’s firmament writhes
like a swarming nest of rats,
asking me to consume more classics,
to get my stomach full of cellulose

and verbs, a false nourishment
that robs creative desire
like a syphilis of the soul,
leaving me starving for art,
an artist with nothing to say
except I’m sorry, I never meant
to let Henry Miller make me
into the apotheosis of obscenity.

The Starving Artist
after Knut Hamsun

This body, my wretched bag of worms,
this mind, a shadow self
steeped in wing and wind and pocket lint.

These words are splinters in my mouth,
taste of raw garlic cloves,
my ideas like autumn

and its colorful carnival of transience.
I’ve been chewing my arm chair.
Hunger attacks me relentlessly,

a drunkenness that erodes
inhibition like a fever fanning the flame
of foolish abandon toward

something far worse,
something without a name
that thoughts fail to touch.

I invent gibberish and what it means,
while my own spit makes me sick.
Writing poems is like sucking

on a smooth, dirty stone,
staving off pain, a placebo
for food. I would sell my eyes

for a spoonful of sugar,
when not even the buttons
from my clothes

contain enough bone
or value beyond
the purpose of holding.