Reveries of Heresy

a tender spot in the skull— where the bones never fused after the fall. scattered light flickers, skitters on the rampart (is it mocking me?) one-eyed bunny, crouched still in my childhood closet— a mute witness. the receiver crackles— an imaginary dandy purring, please—(please)—me. a word you forgot (or haven’t learned?) rests on your tongue— no, a  snowflake , melting as you graze it. ⸻ hand-me-downs from a hundred lives, a thousand soiled linens, a million sins— sweat-drenched, rancid. daddy’s evil eye. mommy, who won’t even turn her head as they defile me. the scapegoat— buckling, knees scraped raw beneath the altar. silence: sharp as salt on gaping flesh. blood. so much blood. gushing—gushing—gushing. the endless hole absorbs—absolves—dissolves— names and sins. the little girl swallows it all, so mother and father can stay pure. ⸻ a voodoo doll pierces her doll piercing her doll— needles tranquillising her to sleep.  the beakless, wingless canary tries to run— tries to sc...

Lily-white baby— fresh-clotted cloudlets, splaying, wiggling across linen drift. Skin translucent as shoji, suffused with sun-glow— lit from within, blooming amber. Then the world crackled open— daddy longlegs, the brute’s leer, my belly trampled under his heel— limbs spindled through nettles, knotting into barked-over  hide— calcified over tender  pulp. This hermetic skin— primitive armour— sealed out shadow and  sunbeam alike. A baby tucked  so deep inside she forgot herself, forgot time— until a wrinkle in sapphire, a seashell’s sigh stirred the comatose pearl— while I, cinching my ribs  against the evil eye, hands outstretched— how do I catch a falling petal, palm unfurled— or let the light  seep  through wisp-line fractures of my soul, grain by glinting grain— until— pearl remembering

It may be true: my pain, a dust bunny kicked up in this hop through time— but still, it feels  like: bedrock torn, existence cleaved, stars — ousted — into black. Maybe both truths can interweave: neither dimming nor igniting the other’s flicker. To cradle the universe— to feel it  flinch. To weather moulting seasons, the limpid gnaw of time, supernovas — blinking shut — bone-tired, ancient eyes. To meet reckoning— not in ruin, but in breathless, starless vacuum. (and the abyss hums) One: a whisper folded into fleeting moments— The other: destroyer of worlds. One: boundless eons— haunting— The other: a bruised chest still quivering— fragile as ghost-feet traipsing the night. Even if no human could fathom this, (too infinite for one chest), the water bears listen, earthworms turn memory’s soil, and Old Jupiter—solemn sentry— tends her vigil. But I have broken enough, bled enough, to know: this pain engulfs Mnemosyne’s river— no exception. And Death, first and final witness, tat...