(this is for house of leaves circa 2013)

there’s this girl I killed.

she’s dancing for me
in black:
black blindfold,
black panties,
black fingernails
scratching at my larynx
pulling questions from my lips.
she wears a morose and
cloying smile.

the hallway is closing in on her:
it is inches from her bare breasts
speckled with black marks, charred
from spare matches when she conflated
masochism with trust
long before I ever came along.

when uncloaked, I breathe in
her sterility     a virescent mass
growing from her chest;
toxic moss that threatens the whole garden
everytime she hoped
her wounds would be given a sadist
to hold them.
her eyes fall on mine like heavy snow
in spring: it blinds,
it’s unexpected and
unfortunate,
damages everything
nascent in the ground
and causes wrecks,
she says to me.

     

             it’s like the way the moon drives men
                      to madness when she finally
                        disrobes, as she goes and sings

  and stings with her guardian tail,
her ferocious sadness,
her ubiquitous laughter
never seen, heard everywhere.
she should have grown tulips
shaped like daughters,
but instead slashes at them
like a God on fire
begging to be humanized,
touched with bare hands,
begging to be boxed
one last time.
       it causes wrecks

each time she smiles,
she is gnashing teeth.
she is twirling.
she is pouring it out in blizzards.
when she cries,
she is screaming.
when she wakes up
      it causes wrecks.

there’s this girl I killed.

the blossoms are frozen.
everyone is celebrating a
resurrection of water
and she’s thirsty,
she’s sunk,
evaporated and coming back to haunt;
raining like God,
Sisyphus.
a storm of a kind that
wears the equator;
how she bore the world
on her spine.

there’s a crack in the world
tonight and
    it causes wrecks
she tells me,
you have opened it.

“the corridor”