WORMS
when i was in my third year of toothshift growth
from childlike absolution to teen-age torture,
my best friend and bitterest competitor in all the
adolescent cosmos said to me,
Steph ,
(because i had not yet become myself, Finn ,)
When I Scratch the Surface
The Worms, Emerge in Curls
and i laughed and, admired and envied her
poetic abstraction and then,
the white worms came.
and, unwelcomed, threaded themselves into my
innocent skin that no longer smelled of honeysuckle.
for a decade i, with aching handfuls of the
maggotry of heartbreak and red-headed
maturation seething under my skin, carry-on'd
until in shameful acts of fear and adulti-fi-cation i
looked closely in the mirror and sliced at the surface,
nails like knives, i savagely welcoming the worms
laughing not
in solitude, mourning, something lost.
SERPENTS
(it slithered through my mind as i fell, asleep -
skinning my fingers as it slipped over my palms, i
couldn't catch it; i missed it; and
curled in collapse of bellycrawl at the bottom of a
creeping pit of cottonmouth'd vipers with their
pleasure-o-us venoms .
in the thankless dank of a college of constrictors
i dreamt, darkly, and tangled with them ,
tale to tale.)
until i, waking from that university of sleep,
grew my spine like a lonesome ladder
and began breathless to scale.
eater of worms and waste i, with needled design,
strike on sunwarmed skin cold-blooded
ink of ancient rune and rhyme.
in the endless year of the serpents anointed
i circle my deathwish and make something mine
in solitude, conscious, coiled.
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