Let me kill the Paradise around the wall as I walk it. Pregnant-minded. An entrance is edged in mountain shade.

Let me stun invention to bewildered stares as you dig the soft grave. Gate the stars. Disguise the soft grave. Shadows & dust take the wind up up & away. The tender nape of the neck is shocked by electric fingerprints. Teeth shift shape to tender the animal breath.

Let me remember shadows buried around the wall and watered, every twilight, by big-boned children. The mouth doesn’t exist anymore. English breaks from the lower gut. Inner inhabitants meet versions of themselves in chambers dug by small fingers. Still wet. Scent of far burnt particles. This echo is driven by six white horses. This echo is the shrill loss I look in the face as it scrapes my knee, gone before blood beads. The woman waits at the gate with dirty lambs around her feet.

It takes 3 weeks to eat the poem. Three weeks of long mornings and coffee spilled under the table where banshees play jacks for big money. Nobody knows. The act.

Twilit foliage dries as vines die in a ravine. A girl gathers rocks and piles them on her belly.

The past rips in half, one side of itself wounded at the split, umbilical eyes still holding. As the afternoon passes it shrinks to a speck in the clouds.

When eyes meet they don’t touch. The eye never ages distance. Anyone could be gazing directly at you from the stratosphere. Now. Anyone is gone.

Dry weeds are not hand holds. Security ripped earlier from root, loose rocks eroding from foot, foothills stung by heavy moon.  

When I shuffle the ledge, my skin in the night opens. When I tiptoe over the arch in the sky, my skin closes and my bones open. All the way up. The blood on the rock is invisible on a clear night such as this one. Stars are objectless light sucked from black holes. Therefore there is nothing here. No base. No perimeter. No below. Between songs I speak like a five-year-old familiar with real angels. My feet are electronic bridges, eroding, meant to wake me.

Your head is ten minutes in the future & everything about to happen is memory. Scarves understand, pulled tightly in the region of the crown, the hairline everyone talks to, especially the cherub I live with. Air is quieter now, like sudden winter. Air has also settled into rocking chair runners, into creaks that reach high A. I make my shoulder a home to wings. Beside my ear are constant winds. Want plantains, he says, want better reception for the game. O tiny cherub. You were my idol, dipping into the lung to bring back, wet, a lung-colored silk. Or this was a sad submergence where came-off buttons struck. I scare the scare out of you. I am withered out the door. I leave my cell phone & a banana at the store & forget to get home. I wander like damp wheat. I want a sandwich, I forget a banana & I eyeball a plantain. And who would formulate the open throat through which dryness scuttles, leaving thee a wingless heap? You would remember to wet your curlicues & never eat the fruit. You would remember to live in one big swerve in the middle of a bucket of pebbles. You would remember to live on the shade-side of a potato sack, half in, half out of the ink.

By my ear, words to file, big motors & orbits after North pavement, delicate buffing. We sit in windows reading lips. A stutter hurries out to curl toes, moments & stray birds. We see balconies, rows of plants waving happy toward the roof. The sound: a drawn-on shadow of seesaw animals, knocked-over water, a mouse’s bleeding eye. Bring us to the midnight in the corner. Who would put a knit hat on with gluey fingers. You stick “over the ridge of the saddest town” to the fire-pit coals, then look at your hand to see melody appear. Your back is so behind you. Below, the foot soldiers caterwaul broken sidewalks & wet cigarettes, languages of the passionate scratch thinning. Envy of false orbits, certain kinds of Christmas in small gos & stops freckling the courtyard, bedroom platform & mouths. It was modular, all of the nowhere suddenly voluble. A private village with no walls, & you looking only at that hand.