A poem by JR Pearson

Underwater Fire by Jim Fuess
                                                                                                                                                           

Break-Up Between Lives or “j’attends j’attends la patience de mon destin atteint la fin
de la bougie”, ‘I See You Superimposed Upon Yourself’

 

                                       1.
                                       Word one, a book painted
                                       with flame. 
                                       El is in the ink. 
                                       & black is tough to breathe. 
                                       Instead, beginnings:
                                       all hail the meteoric rise of the godfist! 
                                       Clouds dune, light screws down the sky
                                       minus the sound of Schrodinger’s cat-claws 
                                       sunk neck-deep into your tongue. 
                                       This just in!
                                       On the second day of creation
                                       “dino might.” Made to detonate;
                                       we were created to fail. 
                                       Since the first breath, vomit. 
                                       This just in!
                                       On the second day of creation 
                                       a complete erasure of beating hearts
                                       a rib wringing with breath
                                       a clean plate echos your face
                                       a modified whisper

                                       & a voice thru a split-haired bass clef:
                                       love’s not real.
                                       Sit down. Before we order
                                       I have something . . . a thing. 
                                       It’s not you, it’s me. 
                                       You need to know
                                       I dreamed you split in half. 
                                       I dreamed you drying in the sun. 
                                       I dreamed you, face overexposed 
                                       upon a memory. 
                                       In the corner of my mind 
                                       you smile like a split stone. 
                                       I can’t shake your top-ten uses of torture & 
                                       I swear your eyes are two-way mirrors for anonymity. 
                                       I keep searching for hidden cameras.
                                       I dreamed you, body folding teeth over a fly. 
                                       I dreamed you, spoiled meat in a skirt. 
                                       I have become addicted to your lips 
                                       but your iris shifts with flames 
                                       for blackened bones. 
                                       I dreamed the sweetcrime silent night
                                       where someone slow-lifted 
                                       the heat from your chest:

                                       We are we are we are 
                                       what we were back then-
                                       & what we were?

                                       Surprise! We were concubines to a riptide. 
                                       Hopeless & blind to talc surf. 
                                       Fiancés to an autopsy. 
                                       Cadavers sand-packed with sea-salt, 
                                       soaked in lye for 10’000 generations 
                                       & left to cool on eyelashes. 
                                       Budding bride to a bullet hole,
                                       the weeping is so so funny. 
                                       Widows to an exit wound,
                                       painted egg-white & allowed to harden 
                                       on display at the Louvre 
                                       for tentacular advances of foreign fingers. 
                                       Bastard bloodline to a revolter. 
                                       Slow removal of snakeskin 
                                       from shoulders in the lineage 
                                       of the damned. 
                                       Peels off in a fury of stars
                                       shaken into snowflakes. 
                                       We’re born! Something beautiful
                                       turns deadly. 

                                       2.
                                       Big Science & Recipes For The Ultimate “Self-Awareness”

                                       Follow our secret recipe for world domination:
                                       -2 cups: voices bricked in walls & your eyes 
                                       humming in the dark.

                                       -3 table spoons of tone caught throats that cut air clean as piano wire.

                                       -1/2 a cup of ocean dust
                                       set to a Geiger counter’s mad burn in the brain

                                       -2 handfuls of fresh wrists cut to the quick. 

                                       -sprinkle fingertips pushed to lips. 

                                       -add sugar woven into the moment. 

                                       Bake until the amber lyric in the inner ear burns with need. 

                                       We are big science. We are nameless. 
                                       Faces with hearts a scar, head as a scalpel
                                       hearts like a hole, head as an echo
                                       head as an echo. 

                                       We are the waffling flower that speaks to sing. 
                                       We are the bird that grows woad for breath
                                       We are oblivion buried the ribbed belief rising behind blinds. 

                                       We are the smokey taste of kiosks
                                       that asserts a kind of intestine intimacy on the inner ear
                                       in the sweat-stained sunlight . . . us
                                       in the bowels of your bowels . . . us
                                       in the oil painting on the backside of your eyelids . . . us
                                       in the mirror mirror . . . us
                                       It’s all about us and why we let you be who you are. 

                                       _________
                                       JR Pearson  

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