Persimmon

Like buying a ticket inland to barely understandable provinces with no language at all I bargain and pay for this warm planet tipping the scales of wrist and elbow spreading my fingers with its weight to read my life-line my heart-line my seams and mounds of fortune. I stare into the sun on smoggy evenings the throat of an old street oven that seems to expand as I anticipate its glow engulfing my solar system. I open my mouth and China fills it sliding into tartness forcing my lips to begin its name over and over then finger-painting my chin with the gel of ripeness. I swallow the pabulum of infancy the sweet mucilage of age. It makes me eat like a person alone who hasn’t loved for years. There seems to be no core the few black seeds hardly noticed in its one undifferentiated cell other tongue that makes mine lazy    the flavour . . . the flavour is . . . my hand moves like an incantation through an alley of blunt flames that can be eaten with a spoon. I gorge on a people’s staple fat Buddha   squat Amida repeat three times persimmon persimmon persimmon and go to heaven.