in the panic cathedral

               of the divine ratio in laon

                              where uncanny angels

                                             sing mall music for the devout
i leave my body behind 
the

  umbra

     of me

	—a

           dark

	ghost

     rising—

  ascending

in perfect

  spirals of

     slowfast

        intensities

	   into her

	     ribbed

	         arches
outside the cows peer over the parapets

the patient cows

carrying the weight of church and state

in the service of 
man                                                                           god                                                                           man
interior: day. there is enough room here

—buttressed, soaring, arced and naved—

to leave myself behind

this is an architecture abject enough to hold

the porous poetry of affects

i vomit out of the million million holes that i call a body
for the nth time today i die with a mouthful of incoherence and
while waiting for beckett
the dirt from your cobbledstreeted shoes

and if writing be speaking

and listening and reading, then

today i die without a whisper under the pen’s beak

without a stutter, an utter, a mutter

escaping from the vaulted architecture of the throat 
you know i am indebted to language but feel sick with it
st therese, creamy, in her mercy asks me:

how long can you keep this lead on your tongue?

how many stones in your mouth?

how much the taste of iron, tongue clamped by molar and canine?

how tolerable

the

shape

of a triangle

ringing at 12700 Hz

impossible

i grapple with my unbodied jaw to release ictic plosives

they skitter across the floor

they fall all the way down the stairs

they leap out of chairs in fright

they rattle like 2 pastel pills in a cup

they crawl under the blankets

they are loosed like frightened birds upon the air
they repeat, uselessly, more than once but never enough:
there’s nothing to be done

               there’s nothing to be done

                              there’s nothing to be done

                                             there’s nothing to be done
but

                              all those contortions without which … no speech possible
i will fail trying