Bless this queasy life oh lord
the palsy of a well-pump
you can’t wash the slop off under
the chapped spigot.
This outhouse
where I’m holed up
with the drizzling shits—
my stomach in enough knots
to earn a medal—the swollen room
of my rectum rented out
to these scum pipes
clogged with cess
Drain-O like a colonic
that will leave you
longing for the dry
gushings to slacken
in the cemetery of your guts
the small intestine a tombstone
with the liquor’s sob-story scrawled in fat
on the liver like a eulogy. The gallbladder
a potter’s field where the greening bile
officiates in conditions of constant
flux. Rigor Mortis in the urethra
my piss shy as a monthling I do
simple addition and lickspittle sums
to coax it out like the creek
after a flood dragonflies and dung beetles
witness the mark no more
than a knife’s girth that a moth
makes hush on my lips shut
my mouth like gauze spooled taut like a butterfly
bandage. There’s this tow truck hauling
hard freight down the jammed highway
of my hind end double time I’m doubled up
and over again skull between knees
like I’m molting like I might stiffen
into the Sabbath the seventh day
of this godawful virus. Through woodpecker-chinks
in the wall the moon pranks me
with its spotlight on these splinters
like little mealworms rooting in the white flour
of my thighs. Beneath all this squelch
a leach-bed teething on loam
so rich it’s gouted. What to blame
for this bloodletting this hot soda
fizzling out of my ass? Must have been the cured
meat we dolled up for supper
with all the trimmings
a week lapsed the grease
on our lips like a whole bout
of leftovers. With single-ply
pages from the Sears & Roebuck catalogue
daubed like shrapnel in my rear
I waddle outside. My father
and I meet in opposite directions
on the homeward path
worried to an interstate
of packed dirt. We pass without words
just hands folded in prayer on our paunches
pregnant with regret.
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