Doomsday Circuit Tour (Sermon 2)
I’m in a leather bar
where the men slip their arms around my waist.
I slough them off ride the train of bubbles
coming up my esophagus.
I’m spitting sea
calling a leviathan butchered, salted long wrapped up tight beneath the organ pedals.
He’s pulling himself together.
You hear me, boys.
Mary’s nowhere to be found nowhere and everyone.
Turn your face to mine pale as a conch
I can be the last thing you see
The Salted Serpent Speaks
What you call a sculpture is my spine,
my vertebrae bored for candlesticks,
filed into the handles of kitchen knives.
I am long dead, my hundreds of ribs
coated with honey,
packed in chests between layers
of sheep skin.
Meat buried unwrapped
so far beneath the earth,
piecemeal so I couldn't
find my way back together.
Yet.
Mary holds my head
in her girlfriend’s room.
The light whipping against
my beautiful eyeholes.
Fish once lost their minds swimming
in front of these eyes,
but Mary puts her hands
inside my skull, asks how I became
the size of a common lizard.
Mary scrapes the salt off my preserved flesh.
I am buried underground in two hundred pieces
inching their way toward common dirt.
Mary scrapes the salt
off my preserved flesh—
every piece of me can feel it.
