Two Poems

  THE HABIT 

What germ lodged in marrow drives the jaw to clench? My left-hand pinkie gets it worst, bowed from the upper knuckle, wimpled in a mess of calluses. Its neighbour shows white blots where nail-bed and keratin are cleft; the middle finger’s reddened by incisors. On it goes: all ten, frozen in distress like set meringue. Scar-tissue canyons. Tattered cuticles. Bristles where a patch of hair I gnawed to near-extinction struggled back, now prodigal and coarse. I wish I knew the root. But worry keeps a private sacrament. Worry speaks in ciphers while I sleep. And though I’ve dined on creatures innocent of any sin, it is my own, my sullied skin this habit has me taste. Should a slab of meat work free and slither to the gullet, then will the exalted peace that passes understanding reach and heal my gristle’s nervous gist? Will I be sated if I self-digest? The stomach waits with valve ajar, broods on its wealth of hollows.  

TWENTY FUGITIVES

Night shift, and the part-time guard crams for his Armageddon practicum. The froth of lust that mounts before meiosis doubles when meiosis is achieved. Iconoclast antics left a mound of shards, knotted wrack and bladder wrack, saxifrage oasis in the sand. The vertebrae of zipper click apart. Troubles with mildew. Troubles with fat moths. I fear you aren’t in any way Icelandic. They’ve grown and grown, these damn worms. We all know what the wolf said. Midnight is the real face of noon. You say that’s meaningless? Say what you will. Sunlight—now there’s an athlete. Runs in eight minutes a million marathons. Excised eyes in murderous clusters plummet from the clouds. Someone hollers, hawking knick-knacks. The final word, again, is fury’s.