Jack Tricarico
(For Charlie Hewitt)
Words cake like dried blood
On my lips
Going no further into air
Than their corpses would allow
Silenced by the brush
You use like a knife
To open the stomach
Of an idle afternoon
And empty its contents
In a rain of severed heads
Where I’m at one
With your amorphous earth
Buried to my neck
A cartoon Romulus
Gagging on the tongues
Of your wiry wolf dogs
Who feed me their saliva
Where I’m pictured like a plant
A fragment of exploded time
Flattened on your canvas
That carries the momentum
Of the streets from which I came
Seeking some solace
Another place to hide
And an exorcist like you
To relieve me of the madness
That’s out there
Previously published in Original Lightning.
