suppression

the stag knows, familiar the feel of the hair on the back of your head

the sound is a sound omnipresent as the ringing in your-

river rambling over your submerged ears

He lifts you up to taunt you just to shove you under again

this is how the apple bobs- with rocks inside your gaping maw, this is how he haunts you even when he’s gone 

the lamb knows little and yet more than most, 

knows how to soothe, knows what to say, 

knows what to cover 

and how to hide, knows how to hold you 

and how to bide her time

so as pages turn you can see a pattern emerge in the ink 

that sours the fiber- 

you’re wounded and you’re bloodied and raw and before

you bite she muzzles your maw

Now now, darling, don’t hate- you should feel bad for them. 

You stay your hand you bite your lip

but the anger stays, a rattlesnake, wasps buzzing by your-

Bathtub faucet scalding as it runs over your submerged ears

He knows familiar the way you writhe in fear 

and he lifts you up to laugh and you laugh in return

you find that inside you all fire has died 

and the sky is a blanket no noise can travel through

you get hit in the head, you apologize 

you stage your own mugging, fist your hands through your pockets, you hold a gun to your own chest 

and then you drop it- hate along with it 

and you are lighter than air- you float above the ground

and apples flit around like lady bugs and land in your hair

the stag pulls you down periodic 

his hands briefly mnemonic, it flashes behind your eyes

but you catch it and he pulls you up to watch

and you watch back

what's your game, world?

illumination is most found in the gutter

I see it glisten when I stare down 

into the clogged sink drain; something there 

down among the strands of frizzy hair and rust

and spit, is more true to man than all this fanfare

about purity and light and god, 

all good things come from dirt

which houses rot, we’re born in blood

and sinewy strands of snot, we come out

toothless and hairless and wrinkled 

Sphinxes speaking in tongues

and we go absent in a similar fashion

leaving behind beer bottles in the deepest trenches of the ocean

You wash the floors until they sparkle and think

to yourself, isn’t this kind of a lie?

If I stare long enough at the threadbare patterns

of this old rug, I will see Manson 

his head, his face, the shapes, 

the cadence of his convincing

If I stare long enough

at the ceiling, the plaster will turn to marble 

to vines to honeybees and cherubs with molotovs

both smacking their bodies against the window like moths

There’s something there, in the obsessive conscious

stare at the ground at the radiator at the corner 

at the dust at the exoskeleton at the bones 

at the drain at your acne in the mirror 

pick and poke and prod, it’s a kind of perversion

and morbidity is more human than the catalog 

or better yet, this desire for perfection

implies a kind of underlying 

twisted need to hide 

no self-respecting animal has any desire to be

anything but exactly what it is 

And we walk around in this parade,

chanting no one’s here! No one’s home! 

We run a tight ship around here

Our pipes never leak, we have all our teeth

We leave all our lights on, you’d never guess

Where these hands and mouth have been

“Sitting in sediment at the bottom of the ocean at the Earth’s deepest point: a beer bottle. It had traveled more than 6.7 miles to the darkest depths of the Pacific, label still intact,” Dr Wright explained.