Modeled After ‘In Memory of George Dyer’ by Francis Bacon

I.

soaked in street water//bubblegum puddle//i hop rain gutters like connecting flights//mitochondrial//as in to fold in on oneself//as in you are made from red licorice veins//and teeth that jut from powderpuff pink gums//there’s a pigeon underneath a statue of the lord somewhere in southern barcelona with a broken wing//he fights his hollow bones in the way you fight spectral flesh//as in i melt into the remnants of you//as in the sting of you is gone.

II.

geometric lungs swell//i’ve been told//just like origami//a butcher wraps cattle organs in newspaper//firm and sweet//pink viscera palimpsestic over obituaries//a cannibal in germany read star trek as he waited for his dinner to melt into bathtub soup//he knows what a body tastes like//roasted in white wine and the sour tang of garlic//he doesn’t know what your body tastes like//as in carnage//as in cane sugar dissolving//in stripes licked across the forearm and neck and wing. 

III.

cellular division leads to regulated cell death//a hazard-light-stop-button for the smallest increments of a person//my mother makes cans of raspberry jam every summer//vacuum sealed//a gelatinous glob of maroon and pulp and fruit innards behind cylindrical glass//we eat syrup so sweet it rots holes in the mouth//the birds that live in the trees behind my childhood home/robins and bluejays and the like//only eat from the cherry tree//i’d spread you on toast//there’s something to be said about consummation//as in to consume is to do away with completely.