Watering Hole

I.

I had written it down again,
written down the line to put me in last place.
No more do I get to try. No more will I try.
Not like I caught it from you, womb cauldron.
Fun to cross that off the cross.

Thanks a lot, says womb cauldron, sarcastically.
Piping in hot sounds of love to the unadorned,
By a warm pool on a wide white plain of dust mostly,
Odd hills make way for a predator—the birds are in office overhead.

That sounds about right, how I felt you vindicated.
Which one is that? A fox.
I palm the oily insides of my thighs,
God, how long have I had to pee?
The answer would be relief enough to let me die.

While I’m only an outlaw—this pain in my eyes is ripping,
Yes ripping—you may not injure my sensitive injured boy.
I’m only protecting my son, in a way,
Even if he’s no less a murderer than I.

What’s that they say about how fine you must be,
To be a man? I look down, it’s starting to stink in steam colors;
I’m not getting any better,
But I’m in the sun; what goddamn use is it crying?
Watch where you pass, hue shaped sparks.
Watch where the oil burn scars. You suck.

Watchfires light my oily thighs.
Why stop there, guys?
Don’t you want to gut my sinus cavities?
That stalactite of my nose is dribbling softwhiskey.

The loam—sand, silt, clay—on your sandals,
Calves, and where they ripped open your finger nails is a warm salve,
But, excuse me, I’ve made it to the watering hole.

I’m gushing blood by this desert bottleneck, head of the lion line.
Coughs rattle my soon bleaching bones.

II.

Then, my grandfather says in a soft, kind voice,
Odd genitals marked the surface of the earth,
A piping hot mucus plain. I had sucked out
My own brother’s vocal cords, and wiped them dry
with a dry towelette. Today, in this year,
we brake the neck of sound before we wipe wipe wipe.

A cage door flaps open and closed, again,
but the buzz horn always fades.

You tramp! says the smallest of us.

Somewhere else, the old man continues, I wouldn’t be here,
but here I am! Our gasps are penetrable only some months, you know?

As if to underline his point,
Hot air pushes out a hole in the neighbor,
And we clap as the dying sigh overwhelms our wee ears.

The new wind pushes the bushes, and rattles a few seeds
in my eyes where they might make root
but my ducts are dry and drainage poor tonight.
I’m just a child, but I have a family man’s pride.

Why haven’t you been dead yet, it’s a gas, says the eldest child.

I’m the kind of guy that dies in the watering hole, spoiling it for
Everybeast. Picked clean doesn’t even begin to describe
how I must appear to birds like these. And senses
wash clean my weakling dream. You say this is Egypt,
but I can’t see beyond the idea of my lard ass.

The antique hacks his last. A cough lickering on his lips,
his daughters line his eyes in pylons.
I bake his lipcakes in cough ovens, while
doughy chocolate smokestacks trail out to
inform the others of his intention to pass.

We take turns poking his raw softwhiskey nose,
his shanterns are dry with flies, and see what the crotched
blind ol’ stopgapherd can do about it. Nothing.

Swouncing the dilligentsia away with his battering ram of a hand,
he pukes out his last lines in his old tongues: Pulp, I trapped sound, I coaxed sin out. O my dirty woundery. Face me. Me ply. Me feud for!

I caught the drift of what was his whirring rattle, and lit the saint’s body.
When I turned, I saw lines of men, in jackets cut from canvas.
One turned his eyes on me, and there I saw what I wanted—delirium.
Proudly embraced, our fingers crossed for more.

What I hear, that I have a spirit, that it’s dark and makes men fear,
Is that the stuff you’ve been saying? It makes you small, signs you off the list.
It’s not that I don’t feel castrated, honey pies,
But another greater gash is higher, and begins to smell if you let it.

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