I Feel Like I Am Caught

I feel like I am caught

Betwixt teeth

If I crack I die

[A crunch of bone and spray of red

To pick gingerly from the cracks]

If they crack

Then split like marble tombstones

Rotted with sugar and neglect

The tender bits spill out

In strangling shadows 'round my neck.

It hurts to touch

They scream as they brush me

Agony

Agony

But it's sensation

And senses are life.

Give and take

Brace and break

Crumple and crush

A tin can to firm boots

[And if a lone scrap of metal screams

With no one around to hear,

Was it ever in pain at all?]

Vanishing, vanishing,

Varnish and lace,

Veneer and revere

Touch up your plastic face.

Pull back the hood and bare sparking wires

Belching pipes

Smoke and soot

Grit and fire.

[Pour the coolant,

Cap it.

There are no strings on me.]

I lick my teeth

[Drink my own blood]

And breathe.

things english speakers know, but don’t know we know.

When we speak of love

It is in crushed roses

Smoldering embers

Black-thick blood

The part of lips

Love in image is such a physical thing

Full of sap and sugar

Drifting smoke

Dimmed lights

Damp heat

And yet here I stand, red as any mortal

Beneath this thorn-scored hide

To tell you that my love

Has eyes like a crooked painting

That eternally slopes to the left

But frames a blue-green sea

In hacked-off strands

Of frayed fur.

My love is the purple

Of twilight whispers

And the black night between us

Breached by the gold of a bracelet around my wrist.

My love is the orange

Of streetlights and detour signs

Caution and warnings

And yellow eyeshadow.

My love is duct tape and cat fur

Asphalt and dappled leaves

Beauty and terror

And stretch marks

Like the imprint of lightning on my eyes.

We trace forgotten scars

In the bitter quiet

And laugh into the bubbles

Of a sugar rush.

My love

Is the feeling of a head tipped onto my shoulder

Hair against my jaw

Laying my hand on strong, bruised knees

And realizing that this wild panther

Does not slip away from me like smoke,

But would rather solidify to listen to the sound of my heartbeat

My heartbeat

And no other.

(And so,

When she stirs restless,

I let her go.)

In Babylonia the commemoration was observed every year on the second day of the fourth month, called the month of Tammuz. It was not only a weeping for dead Tammuz, but a weeping for dead vegetation. The dying leaf had a mourner. The withered stock had a sympathizing friend. For the blasted blade of grass there was shed a tear. For the barren tree bereft of golden foliage and luscious fruit there went up a cry of sympathy. The ceremony was an expression of sadness that came over the people as the oppression of the heat of summer bore down upon them, the water supply being reduced, vegetable life put out and human life consequently made almost unendurable by the deprivation and heat of summer. The time of weeping was one for the expression of personal sorrow that lurks in almost every heart. The wail of anguish was a relief to souls burdened with their own peculiar griefs. The soul found relief in lifting up the voice attuned to some form of elegy. There came a relief like the rolling of the burden of guilt from the breast. The ceremony was one that embraced in its performance the expression of confession. It was, however, performed with the consciousness that the drought of summer was but for a season, and that there was to follow a period of happier existence, as the succeeding winter should merge into a new spring. Tammuz was supposed to leave the land with the season when the spring growth was completed, to come back again in the following year. He is considered as dead, but his death is not an absolute one. He tells the mourners what to do as they gather about his bier. According to some allusions he seems also to be a lord, as it were, in the bowels of the earth, preparing the inner earth for putting forth a new stock of vegetation, as spring shall come. Hence, the hymn to Tammuz in this thesis calls him “the generator of the lower world.”

Frederick Augustus Vanderburgh, Sumerian hymns from cuneiform texts in the British Museum (via wortwyrd)

Look, if Richard Parkinson can translate the entirety of Peter Rabbit into Middle Egyptian, I can translate the Spongebob Squarepants theme tune into it too.

Plus I used a Conditional phrase. My former advisor should be proud of me.

The raging crown of Summer,

Livid over maddened eyes-

The heady burn of dry air

Poised on the precipice

Of swallowing whole

Half the country in a blinking

and the other half in terror

of the too-green arms that strangle

Gentle blossoms in their beds.

All that, child’s play,

A matchbox world in idle hands

As they fiddle with the package

Fray the edges soft with age

And remember of an evening

When the sky is black with soot

The loam-dark halls beneath the earth

That welcomed his fury, and gave birth

To the fiery death of melancholy

As the smoldering fields of war

Swallowed the heads he piled

on the doorstep of Death

And the welcoming graves split the earth

As a lover welcomes

Her soldier home.

(He caresses her in the trenches,

Kisses her steel,

Breathes in her cyanide perfume

And laughs at the way the earthworks growl as he leaves their cold embrace.

Soon, love, soon,

And when I come to bed at last

I will grip you

As the roots of the hanging tree

Grip the veins of the earth,

And love you

As surely as the fire loves a witch,

As the sweet rotting contagion

Loves a warm bosom

In which to sleep

and strengthen anew.)