riverfire

Water burns. Often a finger is a vessel punctured as it moves through guarded channels.

*

As if we were ever afraid to speak of desires. Once the mouth. As if we could cover every possible hole from which blood has been known to pool and rust. How many hands does it take to suffocate a shoreline. As if we tried to cup a burning artery. If the blade of grass at the bank that bends, then creases torn from the fistfuls. As if driving into, no guards for the rails. The bone cries, then marrow. As if our shapes exhausted shape.


*

From ontic to particulate matters: of sees for tearing at the river, then unseen the difference, tete a tete, unless the eye quenches. As if we could, by holding our breathes, scare the quoting. To shift from things to shifts that are shifted. As if we could tell who was marked or when it occurred, if when was ever this when that is meant as sounded, spears for the temples to engorge or be engorged by.

*

How abstraction drowns a causeway, how oxygen needs be said just once more for oxygen to become its opposite. Mouth, ugliest of human protrusion. As if the river did not catch, the flame is not, now mouthed, this particular water's lit and shit filled kiss.