Stop asking if power is derived from ambiguity
And listen for asynchronous love
I’ll chew my mouth to shreds
Before I talk
Tongue scars in uhs like rubble
Sucking topographies
Like the bas-relief of pennies:
No discernible value left rubbed or made molten in your mouth
At first we thought of nothing but
Middle Aged Skin
Low tides in salty exposed pocks
Low tide—an emotion
Dormant until suppertime
We saw change unmoved but ascendant
Cooked in the shell for slurping hunters
Did you know
That you’re lit from within now?
Because I’m blind?
No,
In consideration of
Two Blaue Stunden in a day:
An exhalation and an inhalation
The thumb to the sun kind
(Ich erinnere mich an die heiße Erde)
This one’s at 3:30 am
Is no one’s lam
No temple door, but merely
Exposed—braided to a
Tshirt slept ragged
We’re all whores, remember?
Not anchorites in pristine cells
We produce logic with experience
Experience as a paltry bone
Traded with sweat on unfamiliar floors
The angles of a full bladder
We listen for stillness
And hear the voice
Of a constellation or lightning
Born in salt water and Hydra blood
A secretary to the creators of weather
A brother to her rider
Who sings
It wasn’t over when
Lava trumped fire and
I crawled into my still-warm cousin
Her jaws-of-life bones wheezing
My fat wings resting upon
Her deflating organs
She who was Frankensteined
In pursuit of terror
By opportunistic wizards
Swinging in the void
She who was once fire
Breathing from the earth’s pores
The better
To tell truth to fear
To tell truth to fear
That the next earth will not be human.
- This poem was read at Efremidis Gallery (Berlin), July 2020
- This poem was published in a different iteration in PORTAL (Tabloid Press, Berlin), 2020
- Copyright © 2020 Bitsy Knox, all rights reserved.