you stain poppies on bone-bared keys.
there are no eyes to look at you.
you become transitive, intangible, touch
falling through flesh and into shaking light.
a wine-dark boy ghosts a hand over jutting
vertebrae, and night shipwrecks between
aspen-white ribs, dust dry in open mouth.
label your anatomy across bared skin: your
hands, crawling over sternum, scapula, clavicle,
mandible. this is the hallucination, your blood
unreal, shapeless and mouthed around. you
are the dead one. your bones part, impalpable,
discarnate under albatross-tender fingers. you
are the fallen one, made harmony, struck.
escape reaches into your lungs. it pulls at
oxygen, scrapes flesh with fingernail, and
you claw at treble clefs and spinning notes.
you are bleeding. anemones spill through
your incisors, petals catching, and the
gouged out eye sockets watch. the boy’s
hands are dahlia-red, mouth a pale sickle.
perfection roots into your throat,
a ravaging. you chase release.
you are bodiless.
you swallow a cormorant-winged sound.
there are no eyes to look at you.