You owned nothing
and everything wanted to be something of yours
but the men came
to move things and things
from one corridor to another corridor
until you take away your childhood
through the long door to the street
But what did you understand child
about the trial and the lawsuits
But how to make you understand
factory layoffs
account summaries
and the unpaid mortgage
you owned nothing
and yet it was all yours:
the leather ball
the patio and the pots
the dining kitchen
where we did homework
your bed, your whole bed
now down the street
disarms.
From my ribs a woman with black eyes is born.
Black lead and incense.
They are jet-black crows that demolish my celestial.
A curved woman with the skin of the abyss and short words
she springs to the surface of my drops in cloudy clusters.
She emerges with her insolent spatula body
to boycott the colors of my canvas.
She grows, overflows, breaks her roots and breathes out of the earth.
That woman doesn't know how to undress me or make me shut up.
Or dance in a swamp scorched by crickets.
Nor interpret my hoarse appetite.
Nor hate the ardent suicide of butterflies.
She does not know.
She falls silent and grows like a deluge of dinosaurs
and she makes a cave in my pupils.
Impossible to stop her.
She brings with her dragging wagonloads of other Mercury women.
They will eat me in the end.
On this unknown land.
No velvet prayers to hide me.
Without temples to save me from her black gaze,
wound,
dying behind her mask.