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NAILBITER

My habits are my help
bad as they are, summoned
to resurrect the Jesus I
can't find the rite to rid
my childhood of. Chewing
my nails to nubs probably
conceals some greater fault,
maybe it keeps me from
committing that overt evil
I've eyed for life a while—

Salvation is bad behavior
in small doses, immunizing
the urge that underlies all
I am. This minor blood-act
stripping the quick opaque
shields that would lead my
fingers phalanx to slaughter
the enemy opposing me is
a strange way to avoid sin.

I bite in. My teeth tear at
the halfmoon hornplate,
deep mouth they remember
war's the norm to some, males
most of them who swarm us
to the kill. Terminal typo
in a font unreadable beneath
its scars, the Y chromosome
is one erratum time must
correct. Many poets claim

the best way to proofread is
to read the damn thing aloud
while someone else checks
the print, this oral method
works best to find the faults
that lie so visible in verse
but remain unseen in us,
the surface we bare prayers
for, instances that palliate

every inherent guilt as it
increases its doses versus
the rest of us halfbent at least:
salvation helps those habits
to commit the same act of
equal prayer, hope's remnant.
What remains in the form
stays intact. Whole to the soul

a typo in a font unreadable
unless one's eye's my one eye
unleashed in sin bars, lashed
to come to an end season
all dirge. I find my hybrid
by interludes. Effigy affinity
praises the love that consents
to view a face in ordain to
console the partial signals,
I tell the day to wait for us
to enter its past
when all eyes shut
and the dream winks its key.

The pail
overflows what it kept
.
gave knowledge yet end, each
My pilgrimage reaches
that forsaken reservation

*
Knott-plotting to fellate Rudolph
the Red-Nosed Reindeer I crouch
behind a snowclad chimney shivering
less from the cold than from my
cringing proximity to the loved one as
he lands skidding a little on
the icy roof: verismo venture, ploy
rugged enough to succor its desired
agency. I could even add my feet
stamp out the small bravoes
of the snow as it falls. Or else
pretend I never cowered in a cove
full of eels eliciting Aegean delays
of day post-finis its druglord intent,
sinister and pale-opaque, tactile even.
Impatient to breed the satyr-hyena
from a handful of fruitkin, in
all formats let your aperture drool
duelling swimmers coiffed at dusk,
the children of accidental clamps
may concur. And yet an attic that's
dustmopped daily is no attic, I cry,
drinking ice-tea in a sandstorm,
all sulk-emberish, numb-only.
Abashment's beverage. My hair
needles the dust. I comb through
photos of mythological scissors,
I tend to fly like I got a wing up
my ass but at least I try. Imagine
balloons released at burials to signal
the bloodnests in the caves, the eave
cotes of blood Earthbound leaves
his sister Skybound to fend bare. 

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