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Safe Subjects How can love heal the mouth shut this way? Say something worth breath. Let it surface, recapitulate how fat leeches press down gently on a sex goddess's eyelids. Let truth have its way with us like a fishhook holds to life, holds dearly to nothing worth saying-pull it out, bringing with it hard facts, knowledge that the fine underbone of hope is also attached to inner self, underneath it all. Undress. No, don't be afraid even to get Satan mixed up in this acknowledgement of thorns: meaning there's madness in the sperm, in the egg, fear breathing in its blood sac, true accounts not so easily written off the sad book. Say something about pomegranates. Say something about real love. Yes, true love-more than parted lips, than parted legs in sorrow's darkroom of potash & blues. Let the brain stumble from its hidingplace, from its cell block, to the edge of oblivion to come to itself, sharp-tongued as a boar's grin in summer moss where a vision rides the back of God, at this masquerade. Redemptive as a straight razor against a jugular veinunacknowledged & unforgiven. It's truth we're after here, hurting for, out in the streets 67 from Copacetic where my brothers kill each other, each other's daughters & guardian angels in the opera of dead on arrival. Say something that resuscitates us, behind the masks, as we stumbie off into neon nights to loveless beds & a second skin of loneliness. Something political as dust & earthworms at work in the temple of greed & mildew, where bowed lamps cast down shadows like blueprints of graves. Say something for us who can't believe in the creed of nightshade. Yes, say something to us dreamers who decode the message of dirt between ancient floorboards as black widow spiders lay translucent eggs in the skull of a dead mole under a dogwood in full bloom. 68 N EON V ERN A C U L A R ...

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