FEAR of SHOATS

O, E, I, O, EWE

The air is miserable with it, flying rats and juice heads with anemic sucks for faces and indents for cheeks, not a bone or railhead in sight. This is no man’s land, the paper doll cut from cardboard and crape. You live here, perhaps O, or E or I, but we’d be damn hard pressed to admit it. I live in the cave with the guano and mice feces, a welter of a dam place it is. And he him with the purple scold on his face yowling rice paper. Shreds of the stuff, like fucking millet, fucking papyrus and end bits and nugatory. Never a dull moment, so Seth the rector rectum. Rams’ bladder, some say, with onions (skins boiled on) and dead men’s finger nebs. Fancy that, a dogs’body toting an ashplant with a cherry on top. Dogs lick each other’s rectos in the hopes of discovering something new and savory about themselves. Fucking curs and bowwow knockabouts, not a brain amidst ‘em. Who in their slight of mind would think such things? I, for one, would be hard pressed to admit it, of that IOUE can assure you.

Cuckold of the Eye

Teeth chattering
and mice scurrying

The eye beholds the mice
not the chattering

(of teeth)

Lattices

when they found her tongue was curled latticed to the roof of her mouth skeins of thread and thistle scratches whelps of hair bridled stropping cheekbones sculpted from memory

when she awoke her tongue was latticed pressed to the roof of her mouth thorn scratches and thistle scars scrimshawed deepening the burn sculpted in the heaviness of her thoughts