I am not contagious though

dreaming up cities all night in compensation

for missing all the additional lives, what

cottaging makes palpable is

only the flesh end and I miss them.

Speaking privately all night,

and beating them to a pulp.
Chasing after language I end

up hunched by fantastic violence,

not violence as in the violence inherent

but a daydream of a brutal violation:

my nested eye in its blue pocket,

my survival instinct.  I am not

historical but somewhat sadistic,

the run I go for is another man’s

writhing table of human limbs.
This is a fantasy of assessment.

Drowning in urgency how relatives

would be rearranged, and the sickle

blank out scheduled day.  I wake up

liquid and heaving, either way,

taking a knife to the gobbet,

or endlessly coming onto a familiar face.
Then dreams make me broad

waking into a deathless instrument,

in parody of my body’s cantilevered grim.

Slipping into my forties I make

noises to accompany physical effort,

I brace myself on my knee.

Like the abandoned railways and sure

start centres, my dilapidation is a matter

solely of principle.
A hanged moth.  While my children

reorganise the city one rubber band

at a time I am heroic during smears,

my devil’s advocate ragged under the lamps,

my futurity creeped out and desertified.

At one moment the balance tips into finitude,

calculating the remainder is actually quite easy,

I am doing what types me rather than the interim.

My body rich in timely organs none of which

is the word, I will see them

every two years equals ten

times at most.
I dream of Kenneth alive in his hyperbaric chamber

and Jean alive in her anechoic chamber

and John completing another circuit, but none

are at rest, I dream that your body is suddenly wax.

Without you, all memories are fantastic

like my legitimacy after their annulment.

A tiger carves the remainder to slivers,

and gobbles all the water from the tap.
I can picture you as a monument

heavy and costumed in the bed more than live

with the increments of your destruction.

And Emily alive in her kitchen.  And all the others

climbing out of cars and pools.  I die

tomorrow without having salvaged

the Concordia, put the stoppers

back in toy pistols.  Desalinated

all the drinking water in Gaza.  I am a pain

to children, and where my face was

the grotesque is spreading, the cloud

promises immortality but only packaged

as speculation my desires

have no more to do

with the propagation of species.