Last night, I dreamt
I slit my stomach open
with razor and scalpel
to the sound of triangles
and cyclic percussion.
Concussed by hot pain, I
staggered between masked
men and concubines.
I could not find my eyes.
Blinded as an Oedipal
remnant, I wandered, flustered,
and hardly mustered the
strength to sink to my knees.
I could not know if
I was bleeding.
Seeking some answer, I
tore my ripped skin asunder;
I took my fingers and tugged
at what was fastened there.
I was not scared.
Liquid trickled like locks
of soft hair across my palms.
I did not run.
I hummed some song
that only we remember,
and from my dismembered
belly, a quiet laughter
tended to dust in the corners
of a dim, baroque room.
I swooned.
I sang,
and so came
the brazen bodies of hyenas, screaming
out from my gaping innards.
Their coarse fur curdled my liver.
I kept singing,
and so came the ringing
of gold coins pouring like white
noise from the tight and poised
edges of new wounds.
I lay cocooned in feeling.
I crooned,
and the moon took shape
beneath me, light crawling
like cities falling toward the sun.
I wondered, then, if there was
meaning in the creeping of spiders,
their willow legs peeking
from my beating heart.
I was struck by fever,
and crescendos nearly tore me apart.
At once, my weight began
this heaving, a seizing
not unlike ecstasy,
and the clattering of
tools and bones against
hardwood floor swelled
into new shores of rhapsody.
I wanted more.
I tore, then, at my own limbs:
took joints like clothespins
and bended them until
they shattered.
Drums droned on, a rant,
a pitter-patter in the background.
I was left among
broken and begging bloodstains,
the flung portions of my torso,
chains and sugarcane,
the fossil memory of my body,
those sympathies that cannot be named,
the pressures and parts of
arms, abdomen, arteries —
so difficult to please! —
rabid, intrepid, rotting,
I kept singing.
I felt no pain,
only a slight
cracking of atoms,
a thin artistry.
I sang,
and notes framed
a small white crane,
that, stained red, spread
its wingspan and burst
like a curse from my back.
My body slackened, but, though
weakened, a rhythm yet branched
from my neck, seeking release,
and my breath yet panted its errant chant.
I was granted nothing. I kept singing.
I became free. I became holy.
Cramped and crumbled,
my form lay humbled
on cherry floor. A crumpled
score lay before me —
before I woke
and all I’ve known
lay waiting.