Poems are commodities without exchange value
                                                                                                          but we are forced to invade new territory
                                                                                                          by crises of poetic overproduction

                                                                                                           We must enslave the natives with our poems…
                                                                                                                              —Tamaru Ryūichi

A beast is clumsy, wounded with a shadow inside of a child where it is wounded with ashes and heavy with discarded blood. It wants to sleep inside of the ashes with a melody that makes it more enormous everyday. It wants meat and rivers; it wants funerals and worship; it wants more human technique, to take hair off its face, to feed on what you said you didn’t want. It is not violent but dirty with violence and thick skin with that inappropriate grin where we testify with shameful little powers, dirty and perfect with tiny secrets hidden inside a quiet just above the grain where sleep and responsibility grow into reckless neglect, into littler mouthfuls of departure. “Back to whence you came, foul beast!” and your fingers laugh a little because you’re serious.  Your mother sang a lullaby to the beast when you were an infant as if it were merciful and impotent—the song closed its eyes because it too wanted to be small for a while.

Bomb played on a phonograph as solecism to a gnawed bone, specter in the marrow, ignored and frail in the weather, ashes to bone, and a chain inside a flower like a detour from representation links empty space to the coarse pestle grinding nouns and notions from staircase to suicide. He needs to be inside every woman’s mouth. Please beg, say the name as if it were a vision of an angle, an angelic figure formed by two planes diverging from a common line, oh yes, a lover, pneumatic as the soul in the bones of a sparrow.

Leaves tremble and the boughs creak when the mind turns the tree into timepiece, and solicitude remains an indistinct color. The beast speaks against being a mere rhythm, gleefully inserts tales about heaven and earth, offers a language about how to relegate its existence to the realm of metaphor, but it’s to late to become fragmented and inarticulate, after being nourished by little stones claved by fresh water, local fauna, high courts and flora.

Tied and separated by viscera, dinner jacket and certainty, the beast shoulders a forest and we turn away to the imagination pissing out fires and evidence, drooling like idiots, smoke all in the yes, itchy with ants, eyes stealing everything.