Once I learned there was no messiah living in my wrists,
           
                                    every movement I made
ended with broken chains.

                                    I took to the oak groves on my hands and knees,
                    
swilling the dust of the acorn shells
                                                            my palms had crushed. 

Even the hills and their tombs grew sick
 
                        with the bits of what I smashed against
                                                            my forearms, my fits of broken stones. 

                                    I exiled myself to the sea
a man would mistake later

                                    for a desert, get lost, and wander over
with storms beneath his heels.

They told me after how my skull was a fountain

                                                where languages I never knew went to bathe.     

                                    They told me burning wings beat my throat
free of its own voice.

                        The man found me howling on the shore

and thirsted so much for a stranger’s love

                                                            he sucked the names of hell
                        right out of my mouth. 

I woke in a house my eyes at first mistook for a cloud. 

                                                            In it, that man dripped from a needle

so thick it took four men to thread it into my thigh. 

                                     I learned from him to live in this world

by living first in the bodies of pigs.
 
                                    Then by living beneath the sea that swallowed them.