The best mind of her generation lies caught by bloodrot among piss and carbolic, starving for oxygen between midnight and dawn, in the concrete entropy of sodium-vapor Annexia,
auburn-haloed wisp of the feminine cursing the land of her birth two decades and six hours in the past,
gridlines of fever charting her coveted path back to self-delusion and mocking her with tangencies of heavenly spheres and the foci of divine ellipses against the unfixed stars,
who curdles between her sheets and sweats the blood that should have nourished free verse upon a lover's wrists,
who sees the saintly camera man in the bed beside hers dissolve to protoplasm, the reversion beginning with the slick he coughs carrying his teeth as it spreads to retegument his body now unbroken smooth foetal pink, the eyes going last,
who capillary-eyed sees the ward at golden hour and feels tile against the feet that shiver from cold without and within,
who braces against lost time with every cane-listing step,
who stumbles into the cement Cretanisms of the city amid the secret police roving for cock-thrills and the socialists aspirating on junk while they wait for the song of fission to sing the gray walls down,
who hides from the labor patrols in a warehouse of typewriters that split their carapaces when she caresses their keys and chitter approval when she essays a sentence and spread coleopteran wings as they jostle to be the next under her hand,
who listens to them advise, Interzone, Interzone, in clipped tones of chitin,
who feels hunger the way she once felt footnotes and proofreader's marks,
who shudders empty of heart along the waterfront and volunteers to be the one who whispers a sestina into the Mugwump's aural canal,
who watches its cocks-comb arise along the ridge of its nacreous head and takes the tip of the nearest upon her tongue and catches in cupped hands for distillation what she does not swallow and earns half passage across the wine-dark sea with rich candyapple Mugwump jism upon lips that have never kissed flowering girl nor strapping boy,
who goes back for more because there's nothing else,
who traces in scholar's saliva from Krause corpuscles to cranio-perineal nerve to the hot ganglion of all that is base and basal, the necessary journey to Interzone,
the paradise of koshary and insect-fuckers on the parabola down to neural degeneration,
where the majoun eases the winter and the fine-ground glass she carries in her joints,
where the encroaching sands meet the rising sea and salt crystals spilled in the Punic Wars hatch into black meat centipedes,
where the junky queers with villainelles and terzas rima in praise of anal fisting amid diesel fumes give her space to sleep what hours the pain lets her snatch in trade for keeping their arthropod Smith Coronas from scuttling into the brickwork,
where holy are the testosterone and the oestradiol distilled in basements,
where holy are the stars that slip between the balconies,
where holy is the glottal nonstop of Maghrebi Arabic and Zonal Amazigh and Mauretanian Romance,
where holy is the time that swells and rots in thick-blasted ropes upon the ground, all the ships' rope that's stuck since Carthage,
where holy are the smoke and steam, the Divisionists molting hard and hateful in alleys of darkness and whale-oil lamp flame, chained inverted Mugwumps fed on sugar syrup in Umayyad trade houses and waiting for strophes and nocturnes,
where holy is each day outside the reach of the centipedes,
where holy is the descent among the centipedes,
where the man named Sloane offers her a diner pack of sugar cubes soaked in lysergic acid diethylamide and announces via thoughtwaves that he has been by subconscious degrees murdering his wife,
whose athlete legs can make a man believe that Troy burned for a woman's sake after all, that three thousand years of poetry are murderously true,
whose preference is for sapphics she can paint at the moment of exhaustion,
whose fitful dreams between the hours of Fajr and Dhuhr are of sin-statues dancing in Chartres to the Dies Irae and a woman whose curves are limned in gold, of the embodiment of hidden passions by aureoles of electric arc,
whose psilocybe visions are of climax on a hyperbolic curve that feels heat once and then carries her into Cimmerian cometary rest forever,
whose eyes hold you like lapis amid the desert rock, like the day amid the night,
whose dance only begins when all men are watching,
whose curriculum vitæ includes imploding Steely Dan Mark IV in between the lablabi and the tajine,
whose bedroom wall is a mosaic she tesser-enacts in jade and malachite and gold leaf and oxides the depth of bone-char ink,
whose tempera-flecked fingertips tease a residuum of Mugwump from auburn tresses so that both can drily tell the other, "Nocturnal emissions,"
whose arms encompass her from behind as she types two-handed into a machine with open elytra, taking dictation,
"Homosexuality is the best all-around inspiration a poet can use,"
whose object of embrace quips in monotone, "Arty type, no principles," meanwhile doing as instructed,
whose voice modulates to a tenderness that their lives of country matters and contrapuntal pain and their world of glassbound blood-blossoms and cellular panic and sun-dried centipede should not sustain.