candid anchor
Trinity, pitiful, disgusting trinity—
their eyes each marbled, lovely in their glaze.
One smacks his spit-sunk lips together slow,
pathetic, stroking at his swollen thigh
before my limb-worm body writhing down.
An old birthmark darkens at his side,
a stain shaped like the lip-mark of the last
encounter, where the pleading woman knelt,
small, horny-skinned, while sideways he would clap
inside the rich suit stretched impotently tight.
Another cradles softly at his shoulder,
smothering it slow, as if I cannot see
what all his eyes keep turning toward: the mass
of breathing people aching at his heart.
Their organics gnaw away his being.
He exhales a plague or two, a bomb or two,
a war-cry slithered softly into ears.
They brace each other up. He does not see
me while his little brother wrecks his limbs
in ecstasy, to my mute dismay.
The two walk hand in hand as if beneath
the wet black dew-light of a forest aisle,
but all the while they wait upon the eldest.
Love, he is nothing you have ever seen:
crude, old beyond all fathers’ fatherhood,
swinging his thurible of corpse-dust smoke.
His limbs creak stiffly, bound with fungi, bugs,
and bacteria wrinkling black and dry
beneath his touch. One black-booted foot drags on,
toeless against the dirt. His face resembles
the face of God viewed from inside the skull—
inverted, pertinent, and tolling out
the notes of dead bells, dead bells, dead bells far
into the black-faced wilderness of hills.
empty swallow