Industrial Flower in the Ash Field
I
A group becomes a faceless body...
My girlfriend, Unity,
rules over me,
she wants me to kill
spiders crawling on her bathroom floor.
She calls me up
and I drive six miles
while she hides those other men
she's cheating with
behind her cabinet doors.
I take my thumb,
twice the size of hers,
and press down on the spotted
spider until his fifth leg
stops twitching.
Unity holds out her many arms
to me, I step up
for my hug, I separated
that spider from his body to touch
her silk hair hanging
down to her nipples, to drop
that white draped towel around her wide
hips, to run my thumb,
twice the size of hers,
along her curved pelvic bones
like ridged mountain ranges,
East Coast to West Coast.
Then she lets me open her salty ocean
with my fingers, after that,
she's on her back, she's panting,
"You--killed--
those--scary--spiders--
Enter--me."
II
...A faceless body becomes a more-demanding mistress...
Unity wants me
to be her
Sugar Daddy,
she asks me
for a billion dollar pair of shoes
"I can't afford that," I say
"Not with gas prices so high."
She asks me to kill
the owner of the shoe store,
"Just like you killed those spiders,
baby, just like that,"
says Unity.
So, I fly my plane
And bomb the store
With the billion dollar pair of shoes,
For Unity,
My love, I know is
A greedy whore.
III
...I married her without a face...
Me and Unity, we
got married, we
had a baby, we
elected to allow our child
to be master of our
house, we
were in debt
and our little boy
shook and sobbed, wracked
with the desire to overthrow
his scrambled eggs onto the floor.
We watch him clutch his knife.
We watch him clutch his fork.
He bangs his cutlery on the table
all day he cries
when we try to take it away
he screams for his toys
he pounds his little fists,
he thinks he's king of this
universe, we
accustomed to his fits,
his banging becomes music,
he's our little genius,
he's gonna take care of us,
in our old age,
me and Unity.
IV
...My strange nightmare...
My arms bleeding oil.
My legs bleeding oil.
Some man
In tan I watch him, he
Cuts out my tongue
Bleeding oil
Some man
In tan I watch him, he
Chops off my head
Spouts oil
Some man
In tan, he
Tells me
I'm an industrial flower.
He's gonna use me.
For sport.
For utility.
For vehicle.
My leg there
in the dirt, it
separated from me, my
fifth leg twitching.
V
...Our child's vision...
Our little boy
looked up
from his high chair,
and in his green eyes
I saw him as a grown man,
his back to me,
in a field of shrubs on fire
flaming blue-hued edges
around red-lava centers.
The sky smoldering charcoal,
the clouds mauve smoking spires
from bushes burnt out black as his pupils
when he turned toward me
within his child's eyes my vision
of the grown man
in one motion, turned
as a thousand acolytes descended
and his flames extinguished,
he hid his smirk
in the field of ashes.
All that thrived disintegrated
Down to the dirt.
