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Cruel Interventions and other poems

Cruel Interventions and other poems

Cruel Interventions


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

An Act of Extrapolation


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.

The Consummation of Evening Light 


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...

The Parsi Sacrifice 


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.

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