Mark Bibbins

My throat is full of sparklers making me a lighthouse for a loveship       that can fly Our mother monarchy sweet land paternity I’ll eat their offspring’s money       and let you have a bite In wilder colors       I can love the copy of  you which is great            when we have breasts He will breathe through contractions and she will heal the faceless and use her eyes       to steel his legs You must see that I’m eating for two sexes Minimalism means       nothing making more of  what isn’t there a green preconception divining a baby gender for which I qualified with braids ablaze       and stuck to my back We are going to win       then make extra babies yes we make enough to make a country Text unto the winged baby       the tiny pill of  mystery that makes me want to tickle the world until it starts barfing clouds Make it free       is not the advice we paid for but a long song about the flavor of nowhere and how we never fill it and how I shave my buzzardy wings       to offend the sublime While I’m quick to swallow       the heaviest business and quicker yet to modify that trash you have a poultice       for sudden holes you have a knife in ten minutes you will marry a parent       and make it do whatever you tell it The raptor you were       does an end-run around sorrow but I’m right here sweetness out of  the glass closet                voilà voilà        so what do you make of my baby Tonight we bomb Tonight we blitz Tonight we barrage Tonight we make the greater migration Tonight our fabulous flock shits napalm on the criminal dads For I am a figure       first of girls in orbit the best reason I have to eat your bed I am spangled breasts       I am shaved like any birdboy       only huger than babies or ladybugs one of each is precious a million a menace My inside is a live mine and I’m after the light that sustains the skin of  women scooping the spectacle where everyone freaks everyone They will say how do you do Mister Ms. Thunderbride and I will say I do it distorted and you       will marry a million of  you in your twisted gown of  flames

He can say it was a painting He can say we were the painting Or that the painting wasn’t painting And that we only happen to ourselves We can say we kept things running by distracting ourselves from the hideous truth of  how things run That we were broken That we lingered near a broken factory That we had broken We can say that the disappointment of slicing into a leek and not finding the requisite layers but a thick white inedible core is not the disappointment of approaching a sleeping animal only to learn that it is dead but it does nudge one slightly further into despair We said despair We meant the strings of impossible instruments that they made in the factory That we had seen That were broken That there were different paintings That could be played as songs We had seen other things That we had seen That had come unstrung and blown between adjacent bridges whose river had presented us a city That was broken That we had been That we were broken That was our city This was our city that was a song replaying itself in the dark