i haven't excised a proper metaphor since returning to wisconsin which is a little distressing since they flit about my iris and loll on my pupil and if it weren't for my glasses i'd've inadvertently torn my conjunctiva by now; but it's alright because my words have turned allergenic or my skin has settled over new bone, new forms still pink itchy and wrought of heaven knows what or the loam perhaps rinsed from the hands of a mother on the other side of the earth. words are unsettled in any case with no marrow yet to draw from nor sacraments no blood left in the skin of my teeth and age there more than anywhere save the yellow of my fingertips.

i cannot seem to write because so little affects me these days, nothing moves or moves in me, i am clockwork again, the bells sing, james sings and the angels and others a subconscious chorus a swell of usurpation that i must quell on an hourly basis and i am tired of this inhabitation but maybe they were right in the first place, and second and third, and i am a stowaway, an interloper, a growth of pathos borne of the rabbit's squeal, the squirrel's tender sockets, broken birds beating their wings against the cellar window, feeble, we freed them, held their entrails to the summer's sky and giggled, but i am i now, ostensibly anyway, have nothing to say, complain, complain, need out of my head, need skin, strangers, falling in, hello oblivion, dear friend, it's been a while but i've been loving and, a little blood is too much though these veins are thick now, the pressure is, law of averages says, just a drop now, love, you flutter the heart but lover let us stroll let us go we syncopate together you tether our legs to bedposts like fattened calves too heavy to soar i borrow the wings of grackles and crows but have nowhere to go with this metaphor so i will return to a dream recently resurfaced set in the arctic a place where remote has no meaning because the horizon is so limited so bleak that any place else cannot be conceived and within this dream there is a cabin and inside a group of four or five with more outside spearing seals or digging up pre-killed meals entombed in ice and snow i am at the stove frying the fetus of something prehistoric apatosaurus diplodocus brachiosaur or super it smelled of julep and aspen seared smoke traced its identity in slow sweeping ovals all across the ceiling as a crone in the corner cast pine cones like dice they rattled and rose as six-sided bones stood rigidly fixed their sockets on the blast door in the wall that began to tremble and in the window a shadow and in the window the panic-stricken eye of a friend who i cannot identify and from the eye extends an arm wrapped in double-helix static that warps the cabin's fabric and behind the facade is a self-instruct button that the arm depresses and everything vanishes in a rush of confused tenses except for her who is me whose keratin regenerates with light speed and we are building a scaled stairwell to the denser gravity above that pulls even now while the blood of our nail attracts half-rotted hounds and leprous kittens lap at the ground and a fierce wind strips their skin and draws it into a mannequin an effigy of emotion wasted on flesh that had already left its bearing we slip into the mouth of nothing.