Cruel Interventions and other poems

You talk about the head of an alligator that keeps

shadowing every move of your body, every thought

that in need of evidence of your living takes the harrowing 

wind on its back and memories of trees felled to develop 

your village that has left you long time for the woman

you wanted to live with for a night because she was that 

transient; nature of the blossoms that cover the field

on which you keep your eyes open to books closed and tired

hoping for a meteor to burn the periwinkles of your eyes

The alligator is that part of your body muted by evolution —

you don’t see it anymore but you know it is there, occupying

the shallow waters between you and your beloved sharing 

the same bed, talking of insurance, or of inheritance, talking

about the feeling that the Russian dolls have always been censored

from sharing: that without light, the earth is a wooden jacket

and it hurts when all wars and vegetables and other casualties

— their intensity is leveled into a warm sheet of blackness 

where you are left with nothing but life as a prop of an alligator head

Someone gives me a wolf

and I tear it carefully enough

to not wake it up. 

I tear it and stuff it with crushed ice

so that no pain bothers it.

Then I stitch at the seam, pound it

hard so everything seems even.

I thank my blood and wave at my 

neighbour, his wife and kids  

wave at the garden keeper

and his tectonic withdrawal

from all kinds of city symptoms

Finally those lovers who’ll visit

many houses for I duplicated the sign

of welcome on doors that don’t exist

I wave at all and then take two dead 

house sparrows, stitch them at the mouth

of the dead wolf and for the last time,

draw the scissors to cut a C and bury 

the wolf in my womb while it is still 

sleeping. The world turns gorgeous

evermore; says the dead pulse

of the wolf as I tie its tongue

to my natal cord. Only now

I feel, alone is best misadventure

only life can permit.

In a strange bedroom light you tilt toward the evening window and ask many things. You
tell me how moles index polygamy and I disagree. You insist on the count but I resist lest
my vulnerability is taken for the sky in which you’ll hunt for your stars. I point at the
crookedness of the telephone wire and you call it a measurement overlooked.

Strange city: here love is an actionable noun, you say, and hate is a classified mail which is 

not the case here. You refer to the poem by Marvel in which he longs to seize the moment 

and bring me to marvel at certain darkness under the sheath asking for light. No, this is not 

right; I turn around but you yes it all in a gentle cusp of your hands, my face twitching from
side-to-side;

this is how a language is trafficked from one tongue to the another, this is how the erection
of syllables warn of a rebel readying for a devour; this is a country's statement of a curfew
enforced for years. But yes, I can go down deep south, you say, and clear the snow in which
we can strike a fire and burn the distance fleshing on our bones.

I will ruin you to bits so that you ache with certain desperation conducive to the
blossoming of many invites in which I'll disrobe you petal by petal. You see how I am losing
my guard? I do not want this poem to be demolished like those many prayer houses but my
pleas exit unheard. Only a ruin rows the bodies, now fuller, toward a cremation in which
fathers speak no prayers...

When I wake up, I look

back for clarity; the girl going

uphill, her dress like fins waving

sideways, she is me and crying.

The girl who loves elsewhere

a good friend, she is inside the well

along with all those girls who are

good to love and love fiercely

The well, an implant of a monster mouth

asks for a little fire to salt the girls

and the head of the religion drops

a lighted match. I can hear all the girls

being tossed in the fire. The girl with fins

waving sideways to signal her pain 

to a city sedated in morphine yields nothing.

I can hear the burning of their bodies, 

the breaking of a rib, the splutter of glands...

Ideally, the vultures prey. But imagine a piece 

of flesh claiming being alive when half way 

through its throat. You are spared, says 

the head, our vultures condemn poets.