Oxosse sea krait (Thai Snake Bite)
i.
i remember that brain melting
boy that brain bursting
but that was not like this
my blood being blessed
by the tiny rivers the conduits ride between
the earth and the world right next to it and the worlds right next to it
burn holes to flow through all of them
all ride rivers of
neurotoxic elixirs, love, these hemotoxins in my heart
run through me like
oceans don't flow
they twist and oscillate and dragpull all the fibers
in you
stretch like string fields bend light
priest, priestess
i bang these stars slow motion out my eyes for you
irises lost in this tide
i'm absorbing all the light and everything that comes with it
if you knew what it was like being this close to the edge of a waterfall
beating this hard
you wouldn't speak
it all ends up in the final water body
every olive sea krait that glides
just a connector to another place and another place and another place
live coral reefs open to something else
these Thai warriors touch knee to solar plexus
fangs to blood vessels
send lightning through chests
to awaken
i can see what that awakening would look like if i stayed or if i went
from here
those west lips want to taste me in the sunset
not the way i wanted you burned holes through me
this path to the skyline isn't like
the boys left with big windows in their bodies
i saw it happen when i was nine
blood those swamp bullets blow a man wide open to the sun
(when i was ten my brother fell from the sky and broke his skull)
not the same way the French are always so alone in cafés with their friends and in movies
and i left you in that bar by yourself in Montreal with your family
i still have poison in me from that night: the who was i and the how could i that won’t leave
but that bite
bent me backward over my spine
back around sacral
ii.
you walked toward me so tentatively
(the cervical balances the big egg brain so perilously)
said you would pounce on my scare if you ever saw it,
glimpsing it almost never
it's always there for you,
it's always there for you,
it catches light in a different way since i don't fear the fire
i was ready for the injection
every initiation is a death
all the angels bring you back with coconuts
iii.
priest, priestess
these stars that i bang out my palms for you
explode as questions
what happens when all the little deaths converge into one big death
is it the same but grander
does the flame flicker in the cosmic socket and not return
what do you want to know
all the poets today are afraid to sing stories
i’m just here to
answer sphinx questions
feel stone give way to windsands
even in paralysis this throb tilts my axis back towards the other pole
we pretend eros is just in one place
but it’s everywhere
woven into all that pulls
death has a magnetism
that can rob me of my faces and my phrases if i get too close
these aren’t just words
i’m right here
walking the xyst
through the black garden
transmitting across the full bandwidth to anything that can listen
THIS IS NOT MY PLACE YET
i have language snaking through double helixes and songs¹
a bursting heart pumping them out into the ocean
new freedoms to give/ideas to kill
what is really me starting to perfuse timeless lips
inexorably wet like when you have no choice but to start a family
i can see the waves of my mother’s scream when she lost her first son slipping away
she can’t scream again for her second
death doesn’t stand still
it pulses and storms and diffuses through the walls until
everything is soaked
it promises to free that slow lightning on rotation on your radio every day
i’m not a soothsayer
but bodies were constructed for these transmissions they don’t contain them
and the avenues of my brain are widening
for the second lining² in the streets that follows the grand boom
celestial static then trumpets ride that bass drum
_________
¹ “Nobody sings anymore.”
-Amiri Buraka
² “they don’t dance no more”
-Goodie Mob