Signing no consent form,
I was crushed from the womb,
Head monstrous, swollen,
Born with pain amidst pain,
Welcomed by tears.
Birth, you may say, was an error.
But I do not repent it, and will not.
I regret nothing.
It is a victory that
Out of the sludge of possibility,
My lobster crawled at least this far.
I am not vanquished yet.
Limits are not absolute defeat.

The hours have bones.
The apocalypse alarm clock
Is waiting to catch me asleep.
But there is no sleep, not here,
Not this far into the unimaginable,
This far into the realm
Of soul-twisting stress.
I am mortally weary.
And mortal.
Asleep at last!
And, shocked by the knowledge,
Awake ....
Alone in the turning fan,
In the layered air,
I have no true skinship with anyone but ghosts.

Her touch is vanilla.
There is heat within flowers, within wetness.
The shadows are down on their knees.
She is fragrant with odors, with orange.
His bones are of leather and bullock.
The strands of her hair are wet perfume.
And sweet, sweet, sweet,
The elision of time and of shadows.

The car is combusting, combusting, combusting.
She is plucked meat.
Wet feathers.
Daylight is a hook which gags her.
She is red tar weeping,
Choked incoherence.
The light is white wax.
She is drowning.

There was a sky, I remember.
There was a sea.
There was turquoise and there was lapiz lazuli
In the markets of Nepal.
There was the actual blue
Of the living light of the rainbow.
I remember, writing this, now,
Writing with the aid of the silent gray,
The gibbering gray soup which serves me as my eyesight now.