The Devil Enters Adam’s Lips
“His hands kept his thoughts busy. They trembled and jerked, as though troubled by dreams. To hold them still, he clasped them together. Their fingers twined like a tangle of thighs in miniature. He snatched them apart and sat on them.”
“Lichens in the armpits of marble statues
differentiated from lichens on the thighs,
eaten by snails on moonless nights.”
“On first
inspecting Adam, the devil entered his lips.
Watch: the devil enters Adam’s lips,
crawls through his throat, through his guts
to finally emerge out his anus.”
i. Implicit
Angels dusting the fingered prince
erase my own name so
it can’t be sold, imprinted
with some counterfeit soul, engorged
going on knowing the hordes
below will forever go on
going about never knowing, never
growing so bold, blowing out
shattered bone into ash into
glass another end’s crash will
smash, hit, and parade just
as Icarus was Bowie before
Bowie, the first Man Who
Fell to Earth, bearing no
cross but bearing the names
of the corpses we come
from, those first glamorous wastes
of effort worth the clamour,
following a man who moves
as banned shadow does upon
the forgetting sand, ghosting a
morally grey character, unforgiving, shouting
what came from your veins
looked like it came out
of a gutter tarring amber
with whoring voices of fogged
obsidian, streaking residue of petroleum
syllables, jellied gutturals, a sentiment
man smudged with the scent
of him, admitting to no
one I read your horoscope
and forgot to read my
own, I ran in terror
into your interior and found
there an echo, silence mirrored,
looking at your face reminds
me of the first time
somebody hurt me on purpose,
in the bruise of a
sun reversing time, memory’s void
makes more textural the textual,
advises the two of us
divided by a shared denial
of hours, of days, of
months, of years, of calendars,
never to confuse self-indulgence for
artistry, or physical intimacy for
pity, for we have been
dying together for two weeks
now, consumed with being consumed,
by rolling gravel with the
bravado of my harmonic rage’s
blackest tones, as though side
effects for sound effects, my
loss a stone, your thought
ii. Explicit
Sisyphus at home in my
throat, a feel-bad feedback loop
of bad sex echoed out
of this wound’s groove, out
of control, threatened and aroused
at the same time, in
a word: houndstoothed, sinewaved, blue-hued,
patterned into textile, we are
beyond tactile, in exile, at
once barbarian shepherds and mirror
writers, we are two lightless
torches enscorched by touch, your
love is a lie easier
for me to believe than
the need I feel whenever
I am seen by strangers
who seek to feed on
the words my wounds bleed,
to find god in these
new pornographies we inhabit blindly,
each exploiting our grief, an
awareness from which perception never
recovers, knowing rust never sleeps,
kneeling before Jung in some
waking dream, trapped in his
remains, this conversation’s interrogation reminds
me of the damnation of
hell’s fires I have been
wasting an entire lifetime burning
my candle at both ends
trying to escape them, lacing
manuscripts with lacunæ, then, offering
no surrender but the end
of existence, friend, a glimpse
into oblivion, thinly disguised as
introspection, an egress nobody is
going to be exiting, not
until we expose my silence’s
intentions, question its evidence against
us, incriminating in measured breath
the exaggerated exasperation of ersatz
caresses, pleasure never so beholden
to its victims as to
permit them its lasting, vanishing,
as it does, from flesh
its kisses blemish, as fast
as the affection our desires
manufacture to mask us diminishes
to abuses beauty’s wickedness accuses
us of executing, tasks us
with denuding the decoration of
our brutish doings, when really
what the body wants is
to stop hearts, not lust’s
intrusions into love’s darkest parts.
