Chris Crittenden
heat staggers
from the weight
of its own teeth,
gnaws creosote,
chews asphalt
into a muddle.
it blurs vultures,
disseminates the force
of their haggard wings,
making the sky seem busy,
a havoc of black arcs,
which dive down
onto pecked crimson--
lump so stark
against the long parched
oatmeal plain.
its horns stab up
like gnarled fingers
of an old dead man,
accusing the sky's
broiled blue face,
as if certain corpses,
when fried
and dismembered,
could see god.
you cry tears from your chest,
the juice of your skin.
it sinks in a soil of doubt,
until parched sticks lurch up
like an old man's fingers.
too long he's been dead,
will do anything to earn
the vigor of a tarantula
or the languor of creosote.
but sands are tugging
on the aches in his wrinkles
as if ants had amassed
on the last twitches of a vole;
and the mountains
are so far off, never to be suckled,
those pure white teats,
where valkyries laugh
at the dunes below,
dropping snow-laced brassieres.
what isn't illusion kills,
and what kills isn't safe for a tongue to say.
the desert, more than anywhere,
salts the mouth with this sad reverie,
cuts it into victims' eyes
with the butcher wings
of hawks and vultures.
you see your friends rise up,
gnashing and spewing their useless poison,
caught under those fateful knives;
and then like furious wisps
of primitive smoke
they're gone.
quintet in lavender,
a flung pentacle
torn slantwise,
contorting
like a yanked puppet,
eager to catch
the hem of Venus,
the tantrums of mosquitoes,
the riots of moths.
a full fig moon
trumps the florid horizon,
churns the five bats
into a wild flare
and they thread
an erotic helix,
revelrous,
more apt at joy
than a rose.
