Prelude b/w Holiness

a 7 in Verse

Joseph Romano

I. Prelude Really! it was a funny first time. I held both of him: pages in one, his hand in the other. Pages he plead me to steal whispered he wouldnt tell anyone Id stolehis voice breathy and slow, affectedhis appeal ex-voto not to pay what wasnt worth paying for both of us to laugh together at first time chaff. Then our hands threshed together our faces changed me to eggshell him to red still laughing to fill a proscribed pause which I seized and ranged regarding his face I pared with mine my teeth my lips sawed through him past skin to bone him strip him down. Stuttering, stoned still laughing, my other friend, 2

vanished till this verse, spoke again, about his own poems, about how it was going, the project, his own palming, off of the poet whose book I was holding At the counter the cashier said to keep a hand to hold requires $17.76 of paper gold. * Unpilfered pages hold my train tickets like tourniquets. They rest on the bench next to their next of kin, lying still as an amputee just out of surgery, while Ive waited up all night here at First-Time Station wondering how sad, to cut off your hand, and hand it to someone for money. I never feel irremediable. I know there is a hand. But do I need to shit, or just drink some water? To make it go awaythis a-rhythm in my heart this hypertension in my ass this bubbling down and up stomach wonder if he were here again would he make 3

me laugh and ask me to take his hand again? * All slings me toward one booked in advance destination. Dying to go fast. Wind horn rails wheels cross my body flagellate my back abase me to kneel before All. This music is no dirge, it is a birth of possibility, why not jump on the tracks welcome the whole thing at the last Communion you give yourself Mr. Conductor joggles toggles you from off/on Last stop At this you wake, with a word that wants to mean more than what it says about inside besides the bubbling the clenching the bomb-omb heart 4

beating systole distole too fast if there really is nothing in-there more than it-self, then its stinking excess lies out-there evacuated... After, outside, you inhale and exhale, pleasure and pain, like a bone bursting the colonic membrane.

II. Holiness The moles are up catching the worm with their paws with four thumbs they squeeze out the insides the squishy grayness of a simple tube b/w a mouth and an anus letting out dirt and earth like bits of the early universe written in verse that says the inverse of what it does when it writes lines of infinitys positions as a 2nd grade proposition: to the left and to the left of that and to the left of the left of that and to the left of Each line breaking quick as the holes appear (in them) as you pass accelerating in number in number of lines in number of what is grasped. You suck them up so good (tastes like tapeworms) with the suction-cup the helminths grafted and gifted you. Grafted because you once had a speaking mouth. Gifted because you let them in (youre such a nice host) to masticate n emaciate you into house-holes their homes where they sit fat and mainline your medulla do more lines 6

of wormfood then copul(a)ate (in) your brain through to the dead last little drop of intestinal rot. O the little lines of worms! Look how they began without you seeing: They were eating (such good table manners) holes in the brain tissue were tunneling a body prolapsed and septic with intussusception which may as well have been like a double-ended decanter that self-penetrates in vitro perfuses itself an image of invagination a strange loop of you who will never stop yourself visualizing not stopping to not visualize yourself traversing the holes edging a way through inside with out. III. What started out as the cosmos the whats-left-after-were-all-done-trying-toStart again. 7

What once was as small as space b/w letters, a place right in there, in the one b/w the two, through lines of continuous lines redefined with no holes so they say, The story goes one day a messenger from light arrived. Of course they never know theyre a messenger. Dont know they carry a message. IV. Lying in bed, fully covered, light switched, legs stretched under covers covers stretched over shoulders book closed. You itch your face and feel it crawl down your fingers and palm which you slam against the wall bursting it like a star or a zit. Orange blood and black legs and guts smeared like Halloween make you squeal your hand go berserk your entire body ball to a fist. Your eyes squeeze shut. You breathe through your teeth. The sink water runs. Swaddled, nice and tight, Slackened, your eyelids, oscillate then jolt open wide-eyed 8

as your neck cracks and snaps behind you nothing but bug blood and the square hole cut out in the wall. The landlord mummy-wrapped the hole with scotch tape, but forgot to evict the former resident, a beetle on its back, dead and dreaming through its osseous eyesockets ever gazing past its plastic burial shroud back at you. The death watches beat their drums inside your chest. V. But then, and here we are again, reading the little in-b/w which swells again like each leg and hair and little eye of the crunchy beetle, which before, your pinky could turn into dust, which usually, sleeps in the square hole cut out in the wall above your head, of the bed where you usually sleep. crib blanket hands suit coffin Go the drums of the death watches... Hot belching pus melts the square tomb old cold

folded

Self-exhumed it creeps out the wall onto your bed growing till its outside-in skeleton touches ceiling. This scarab, this atrocity. VI. Now on all sixes resurrected its pincers undress sepulchral vestments. Naked, it glows lapis. I am not your Lazurus it says nor am I the Giver of Life. Its mandibles mill back and forth flicking stenching saliva lisping each word while its wings bombinate waves of vibrations you could see ripple space and make the marrow in your bones disintegrate. I am not your messenger. I do not know why I have returned it says I carry no message. You cannot reply. Your hands reach and feel no mouth. 10

Your head hurts. Your nose bleeds leaks long white strings wriggling out of each nostril making a heap of curlicues teeming in your cupped palms and at your feet in-b/w you and the Thing, slavering, six-stepping closer. You hold out your hands like a child scared to go under a sprinkler, like receiving the wafer like you want to pet the Thing. Your only and innocent offering your own blood letting worms fall out of you. The Thing has not a tongue. But it drinks. It hovers, humming with pleasure, then whirls around and around you so fast so beams of blue diffract and atomize your eyes. I hunger, it says. VII. The Thing burrows and throws you down the hole. You land in a pool of saliva and lie there 11

like soggy cereal pieces of you dissolve digit by digit. Now the parts of your carcass that are not necrotic feel only hot breath that eats dead flesh. VIII. As if through holes cored in a forbidden fruit, white strings coil out your head charmed and curved like 4-d snakes, arabesque and enwrap your face an eyeless Medusa lifted out of its grave toward the Things light only the dead can see as if Wormstrings tie themselves in elliptical rings: one from above one from below one as if cross-secting your skull The Thing works and rolls a wormy dungball of loops and knots of rings bent this way and such that one break b/w two implodes a whole through a hole

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Which speaks. IX. Mangled though Ill make you you are beautiful. You, my putrefying ambrosia. You, my song of phages fucking dead cells. My kiss emulsifies your mouth a mouth in mine. You do not know why you cannot say you understand the game I play. The truth for you, my dear friend, is I do not force you to speak from the place where a foreign body comes into you from inside you already becomes more than you. I am inside you. Let us now receive the messenger from light together and make everything that isnt seen out of light

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