God bends down the screen.

She wasn’t bent to the right corner.

What doesn’t fold doesn’t form a good kernel.

Without a good kernel there is no holder for the dream,

The excess, that becomes sex, turned around and inward.

God doesn’t know about her own process.

She is looking to bend down.

The screen was impossible to make stand

for something, save one feature: she stood.

But she could “figure” nothing; she wore

no clothing. And yet we insisted on her

shape: she was hung flush to the wall.

So we insisted on calling her “she.”

Lenticels: the cracks through which the plant breathes.

Like stomata. Like spiracles. Like self-induced scars.

Sometimes we found words like “lenticels” and could

not breathe through them. Things had to be bent into

shape. The craft was in the fold and the surface, the

flow down a screen. We sought the simplest words

and their strangest combinations. Sometimes we

got drawn up by the current of a strong place,

or we refused it and threw ourselves at its feet.

Then, we started to paint. It was easier to paint than to draw

on the vertical surface; the fluid would drip, and we found that

everyone found that pleasant, the way it obscured what we didn’t like about a shape.

When I woke up I said I would move to the core of being.

I woke up and wrote this down. I put the notebook elsewhere.

I imagined the core of being would be dark, hot, untenable.

I woke up and rubbed some substance into the skin of my face.

Reflected light expressed the health and youth of the bearer.

I am just trying to pull something out from behind my eyes.

This is a catalog for flogging or for promoting

The loneliness of ceaseless promiscuities,

that smiling zone of impossible finalities.

“I’m terrified of the thing,” she said.

“It rotates, it rotates between my thumb

and four fingers. I can’t but turn it in

my head’s digital proceedings.”

“Beauty is terrible,” he responded.

Apples bred for their lenticels, corked peppers;

Flank and the stripes of the female’s cruel skin;

Mathemes inscribed on the oriental cheekbone

Ghosts coming for the part that isn’t covered.

Roots twined around a center: the center is around a center

What this means is that those are my legs twining and twining

around a center, around a string thick but scaled in microns

like the fur around the small high thumb of a long beast

The dewclaw, the spike-heeled piece of trotter

chewed at the tip like a sweet tuber charred to

bitterness different from the taste of the excrement

of the soil—it is the taste of the dust of a cunt

The center has been set: I can taste it with my cunt

long-tongued language which sticks and melts

and stings and dries me out: a head bites off a head

What your lungs cannot do is the center of me

The condensation of vestigial organs

Heat and the function of the scrotum

Poems are the dewlaps on male cattle

I inherited the thickness of my hair from my father

I inherited the thickness of my hair from my father

I invented the thickness of my father

Coal and thick rods at the core of pencils

That leg looks bad because it’s immortal

Her lower half is too muscled to sit still

Thick is the fetish of the pervert who disavows

The female pervert takes up the pen and her strokes

are quick as liquid flowing down a lacquered screen

She imagines how a loose fabric could puff into a bud

She does it the natural way: she picks the buds and unfurls them

She did it the natural way: she went outside and chased some boys

She does it now, making the leg into what she lacks and taking what

she doesn’t need anyway, and saying to unready victims the following:

That leg is mine to center, mine to use as the support for an answer

If there is a twitch to the thumb I will mandoline it

But the tip that brushes only the dew remains