John Nòto

VIBRATIONS IN THE GRAMMAR OF YOUR UNCOMBED
HAIR CAUSE ME A FORCED-CHAMBER EXPLOSION

This flood of passion is a river overflowing through your
ribs into the valley of soft, complex machines that make
me tick; it is a draconic smoke forced up the flutes of
stand-pipes at high-pressure, a stuck horn bursting out
eardrums, a blowup of your face in torched paper, a
swollen mango thrown, cracking ivory cups dispersing
paint and powder.

Like a whispered marionette, you hang by sinews
laconically from my optic chasm, a reservoir of muted
incantations cut open to run splinters through your nape
with rough hands scraping at gauze used to cover the
scars no daddy could wash clean.

You were soft-selected, made animate and coated with
milkglass and hardening pearl. Daddy is a wax figure,
the ideal on the viewscreen. You snake in his lap like a
belly but with more precision. He turns your aspiring
words over in their graves, you with the wandering eyes
and lips, the ones that startle me in bondage through the
blinds before dawn.

Fill in the gaps in my pain and arrive at the same
destination: to squander the roots of things at your
breast, lost in an underworld savaged by revisions of the
past where it seems to matter what kind of symbol I am,
and you are all fruit and squirm.

I'm starting toward the window in gasps and, looking
down, I see the street full of light already caking on
asphalt. I prefer the dark walls of a jazz club where your
father lives at the bar entertaining his own drool as we
exchange knives and flutes. Fits of ribbon close in on us
nightly, his chalk shell tied overhead to the frame of a
vandalized portrait of you made from baby sparrows'
tongues and crewel.

When you stopped calling me at midnight, quavered
in the low registers, I turned one palm outward to lock
fingers with your wake, echoed and stored in the voice-
mail, and I wheeled over on our knuckles slowly,
inscribed the name of a city we roved separately in the
stone of a small plot under patterns of light building into
walls, the skyline a printed circuit-board operating
twenty megavolt guitars, chord and discord on the wire
immolating reeds in your hair on a woodwind fretwork
times three.