Where Poetry Begins, I Begin Again

Stagnant puddle in a Humidity thick with fly-sweat. Godweb

of sun and heat-- stuck in thismoment forever. Here Poetry begins

with Father Fist and Mother Bruised, cacti needles in skin, carebear

nets and facecake. I knew I was shuddering in some place holy,

some place tattooed into my soul's soul, some place scraping

my mother off pavement with little hands/little water. Heat-stroked

thighs, metal eyes and cat gone hiding beneath the sofa: breathing

ball of endangered fur here Poetry begins in the only cool blue thing: pool,

aurelian surface lapping and slurping into the side-drains. I am rescuing

all the dead bugs, holding them in my palm and blowing onto their wings in belief

I can resurrect. Here Poetry begins so thick I cant separate air from water, sun

from sky, hot from black. My world at his knee cap, my world with a crick

in my, my world whirling around me from where it all began, where there

must have been some frosting amidst swollen lips and eyes my mother wore

the fashion. Some nights dreaming between the two of them I'd awake, listen

to their lungs exhale and fog the room as far as I could see. Some nights I'd lift

myself into the heat-cloud above them and wait for the rain to pour out of me.

But it rarely came and when it did, it came in hard, slanting sheets. Till I became

nothing. It all begins here, here this place needled into the pink behind-my-eyes.

I go back there. I go back. I go back.