Poem: $

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once you leapt from the sea

and distilled dawn into beads

brazen on a sunned chest.

you danced on the pinnacle of a tooth of a shark,

of a mammoth, of a walrus,

flirted with peacock feathers,

agleam in bone, coral, nacre and amethyst,

brassy and golden,

abalone and chalcedony.

you excelled as you danced

to sparkle, to flux and fascinate,

lustrous of liquid crystal,

of teal and amber, emerald and silver

in sunset wraps of orange and ruby,

demure there, in the center, as you and i sighed-

by-sighed with the spirit of a love

precious with magic.

 

now you are whispery stacks

of parched tongues of long dead men

on two-faced circles and rectangles,

papery or cold metal

or ethereal as a pixel named greed

or fat as an ingot of tongues

when you bark to warn of threats

from borders and robbers

and speculate lustfully

about the risk margins of war.

who is wearing who, who is whose ring? 

i know what it’s like to be bent into a cycle,

heartbeats leashed to your wallstreet scrawl,

and that hammer of logical debt.

and to be sucked on by mosquito-like numbers

whose electric caterpillars chew across screens,

stressful as they hypnotize 

and shapeshift to become my eyebrows.

every hair on my counted head must follow,

erect or slumped, arched or crushed,

where trillions proliferate 

insubstantial above the crowds

and i fight against you with all i'm worth 

to free a sliver of possessed mind.

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