January and a fistful of soil is thrown over my head. The clicking clock of my collected years is an hourglass suffering from difficult digestion, pebbles falling through the narrow siphon of its middle, clumps of soggy sand, years taking other years with them like wet wads of maudlin paper, doggerel scribbled onto the pulpy pages. [bad word] my fingers over the taut strings of my prepared [bad word]  squeezing out the gaunt and uptight tunes of something prinked to exhaustion, throttling the life-song, a fishbone stuck in the hairy opening of my throat, the thin bristles of the flesh-meshing filtering out the plankton and krill, filtering out the fueling fodder. 

And all the while the young woman sits on the trombone-shaped fold of her wire-thin limbs, smoking a first cigarette, wondering why her body is beginning to swell, feeling as bloated as a week-drowned cadaver, blue about the lips for underestimating the winter weather. 

And all the while the small child is leaning in to listen to the bulbous nosed-master, her rabid mouth opening like a slippery void, a sea cave licked out of the solid rock of her face, time like a wave lapping at the same spot. 

And all the while the tiny nub of flesh, that white-writhing spore or larva, spits up and swallows back down the thick milk of its own bile, working like a little cyclical machine, breathing the same air in and out, the skin sphere gaining appetite with every rotation. 

The backwaters scream out. The hinterland pulls all flags up the pole to fly.
Hey hey hey hey hey, darkness?
The pointed breast of the beast.
Hey hey hey hey hey caution?
The bleak jaws of the rattrap.
Hey hey hey hey hey, darkness?
The pointed breast of the beast.
Hey hey hey hey hey caution?
The bleak jaws of the rattrap.
Hey hey hey hey hey, darkness?
The pointed breast of the beast.
 
Dear Inner [bad word]  dear Stricture, dear Homemade Hard-baked Disaster,
Will you tell me of your new tricks?
That bundle of bombast and under-table tactics?
I was on a hoping-streak,
Riding on a naïve and farcical lie.
You were there when I got back up again,
Ripe-riddled with rot and holes. 

Hey hey hey, blindness?
My eyes are painfully fat inside their cocoons.
Hey hey hey, [bad word] 
I am hunting far and wide, firmly filing away my failures. 

You lift like a thick mist from the white hill of my hip,
Ours bodies like plaited dough,
Our eyes in the mildew of our faces shining out.
Our tongues like electrified flesh, strips of snaking flesh,
In the bold jaws of bear traps,
Dancing.