"Points in Blood" – Poems by AG Davis
27th
2009
Unfixed
Unfixed: wanting to alchemize a latent feeling;
This unremitting stain in itself to itself, by itself:
Plastic, malleable, moribund—disemboweled—
Walking through backward amnesia in silent, open fields;
I have nothing to say about this grave,
Or eyes to place a reminder.
**
*
Subterfuge
Subterfuge—
Confusion on points:
To slowly tier the bitter masquerade,
Or, To pluck the machine from the tree?
**
*
Memory
Parasitic memory, this parasitic wing;
These ember roseate dreams fossilized in austere ruins—
To touch poison, then awake never to touch again.
**
*
Nails
Blunt nails and ivory horns;
Remnants of masked temples—
Perpetual desertion forming ropes of blood:
ALL of my mind tipped with mirrors.
**
*
Adder
Poisonous roots have settled in—
Time drips its hemlock coiled like an adder—
On sanguine beaches,
Dreams move into glass.
**
*
SCALE
I.
Your mouth: a smooth line in space.
Your eyes: two plates of fire.
Inversion forms a scale, to be judged by my desiccated heart.
II.
The reptile follows its own distant swagger—
Impassive, broken in reverse;
Allow me to begin and torque the exterior;
Allow me to dine on soured lights.
III.
When we notice ourselves,
There is no image.
When we notice others,
We sneer and displace.
How else could it be?
**
*
Coins
The heads of ineluctable progress?
My coins still secrete execration . . .
Faces, feces; they walk away
On foot
Treading great plods of shit
In tail.
**
*
RUST
The enervation of
Leaving is on grounds
With a warm shiver (when
Nothing will open).
Just as I know
There will be no words
(No words
And no focus),
I also know the image
Of rust left to chance.
**
*
RUST II.
Nothing will open;
Just as I know
There will be no wounds—
There will be no words,
No second thoughts.
Our fingers together,
Lassitude in molten, refracted
Flesh—
Dissolving,
We proffer no solution,
Only mist left to a worm’s
Solemn vision.
**
*
Hands
Hands in abeyance—
Well, I mean this—
No— THIS.
And there is no shiver,
Just a bud in the slave’s heart,
Touched by a frozen growth—
Thaw out your presence;
There is no liquid,
Or flowing:
Just a bud in servile remembrance—
Or clocks that shimmer
In dead sunlight.
What is dead?
No less,
Just flesh in chains,
Or flesh in—-
**
*
Plasm
I have made myself into glass—
No—A mirror.
Now I am more afraid of myself
Than the sun.
It blinks and scars my eyes,
But this solemn antipathy scorches the bones.
But sometimes bones can be
Made into a fecund city,
Teeming with life
And shameless as the sky—
That is what I’m ruthless for,
The dismissal of my reflection.
**
*
Around
There is a silent noose
A R O U N D
All of our speech—
Each word leads us,
Inching (slowly, quickly) along,
To the Gallows…
A sound conclusion?
I will never be the judge.
It is a matter of fact:
I can’t see myself
There.
Only HERE…
But it is of no use.
No matter the perspective,
Words always crack…
Time always devours…
Living in a certain sense…
Living.
**
*
Neclace
I begin to despise,
As I do others,
You—
And then my mind
Fondly embraces,
As if in a platinum icicle,
Your necklace:
A totem of some sort
For what humanity
Could be,
Or what you
Once were.
___
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