The Perforator God
by Ariana Reines

A silver corsair

In a violet distance

That I am capable of imagining

Inside of a world

In which the cashew-colored sky

Emits a musk

Of snow

Is the zone in which

I will lay down what’s most harassed in me

And make it die.

A miracle of loaves

And fishes

The cracked floor

With its silverfish

The cookie-colored

Face of the black-haired man

Whose purple cock just spurted

Its last

Is asleep, the face is asleep and it is

Attached to him as he

Is attached to the world.

I know that there are pavilions

Among the lumpy mountains

In which some knights sit crosslegged

In their mail and tunics

And make light of the blood-red sky.

It is cheering

To look at pictures

While the wide world

Slides down this faux-wood log flume

And does not disclose

Does not disclose

What I was sucking it

For.  A loser is

Still a loser in death.  A wind-hover

Does not love me just because

I am here even though

It lives in a purple that has to evolve

Into being dead

The wind-hover is just something that is

And so am I

And a weathervane has a place inside of the air

This oatmeal-

Colored sky

The lovely proportions

Of metaphors in bedtime stories

Written for children after World War Two

The strange mixture of fear

And trust, some shattered things

Still husbanded by something else

Mysteriouser and further off

An idea of a “the stars”

An idea of a “the world”

Licorice drops turn the eyeholes on

A flesh wound blooms

Polyps and cancers, iterative

Like our contemporary arts

The Master of the Conquest

Of Majorca made a painting

Late in the Thirteenth Century

In which I understand everything

As though I were

A serrated escutcheon

Or something perspicacious

Cut up or folded in

Poked and soaked

In what flowed out.

I have a face like a sackbut

It is not a style

It is a font

A form

A foundation

Awkward and somewhat alive.

Maybe I fell for the sigil

Hidden in the letter

Or the letter hidden

In the picture

But its being great

Albeit uneven

Doesn’t make me give any more of a shit

Because I fell

I fell

For it.  They seal the thing

Of cheese with a lion rampant.

The lion rampant has a tongue.

The perfect correspondence

Cannot be.  Cockle shell-

Shaped clouds bud in the dark,

They people the vault

With their comforting nuances

The beauty of indecision

The beauty of things that curdle

And die, their exoskeletons

Shriveled into words

That lodge themselves

In the language

Distant and a little strange

But not altogether unwelcoming

I will be born again

As a bumble bee, dried up and dead

Fried on the wooden floor of a cupola

On someone’s newly-renovated Victorian house

The contractors will sweep me up

With the other dried-up bees

I guess everything that sucks dries

Up, or something like that.  Maybe

I can insert myself into something more

Invisible, something smaller.

The jealous, rich minds of poets

Lonelier and more confused than ever

And even more eager

To justify and verify

Their existences

Will also, in the future, in their crueler and deeper parts

Recall the parody

That my death as a bee once represented

So long suckers

A brougham made of construction

Workers flattened into paper

Carries me heavenward

We were never women

Of means but nevertheless we managed

To be poisoned by our thoughts

And still do things all day

Enough to disperse ourselves inside of

The vague aura our expirations

If we are lucky

Will have caused to appear

If not actually exist

Inside of the weather, the real

Weather, one day.

Also by Ariana Reines in ActionYes #6:
Sucking