JERRY #6

Ellen Welcker

a clownish word means
“to belong to me”

some spastic neural pathway
or insistence on a thinkership

in which commodities could speak
in which I am a failure

of crypto-representational proportions
a failure to grapple with

my interiority has been compromised
my markets have been encroached upon

to what degree no one will say
perhaps my fission mouth will say

perhaps my winter mouth, my
coal shaft mouth, my high-value target

mouth, my ideology mouth + my highway
mouth my friction mouth gap mouth alliance mouth

my body mouth my economy mouth
I’m speaking of course with my terrorist mouth

my prayerist mouth. my viable mouth. my undesireable
mouth. my blood-egg mouth. my occupied mouth. my occupying
mouth my colony collapse mouth my ruthlessly self-critical mouth. my possibility mouth. I’m speaking with my we mouth. my self + self mouth. my
self + self + self mouth

my face
my face
doing oratory practice in the ghost-child’s bedroom

my face dreaming
of something disturbing:
a statue of a face or a big-lunged man

bye-bye statue, bye-bye face
I knit a bit of ash, a bit of cement, I knit
a bit of bone

for the big-lunged man
the lungs, ingenious
regenerate, the way humans evolve

to open secret spaces
vestibules or black boxes
in which tiny souls lie slick

and fetal, viscous and bright as spawn—
double, double, eye of hurricane, hole
of gone—bigger, stickier

the seen, then unseen
my face dreams of something
disturbing: wakes

to find the ghost-child eating dirt
in the sideyard, singing bye-bye gargoyles
and gnashing her lungs

lead with fist and skull, revolutionaries
like a revolutionary narwhal

the way humans evolve to spray germs
on everyone and other

the way we spit and lick on this weaponry
shining them, shining them, shining

the myth of the newborn takes nothing
of this bloody world into account

the little cilia working
and the nuclei bursting, bursting

how the baby says something
and I say it back

how I say it to her
and she says it back

it is her thinking that stars are little moons
& the monster telling her no, diamonds

then guillotined, guillotined—o
the monster—the baby—the microbe

guillotined—see?
the clean symmetry?

of flagella or twisted tooth
the orbiting vessels of monster or microbe

dilate, dilate! dilate—
this horn-crossed heart is encased

in a skin so blue, it’s hard, hard
in a skin so blue, it’s hard