of the value of life that in the city under this blank page wilts

without a word, without honor, in the conflict of the rose

the red of it in my hand blackening to crust, because

I am afraid I will never outrun

this ignorance glittering like a mouth, hatchet as the sky I have dragged from border to border, its language pointing

like a conspiracy, a faucet I am too depressed to get

up and screw shut, to make skin interpret the cold dark floors

where the mouths are strewn, their collective weight unraveled

           to private eternities

at the end of the employment contract

at the melodies of the earthquake, because

I am a good performer of value I have never seen meted out

in justice to complete the charts, to poison the rivers and round out the bones in the plumbing system, I am so afraid I will keep stumbling

on the white of the rose in the forehead of my friend

who is warm now inside the precarious wood and stitched up tear                     ducts,

afraid the seams of my clothes will murmur like every woman

whose red and black blossomed in my hands, who like me was winter that stopped fogging the door of the center one day, except that I am

alive

below the night whose face is the back of God, what Moses

accepted in lieu of the promised land the way we accepted

insurance money for the house after cancer made roses

of my father, who offered and offered his bonebread

in the hush of the telephone and hair that carpeted my wedding day

in this Hollywood country of pines, of lines of chitin marching

toward the legalized edges of our lives, where surfaces to which waste           clings are

stacked and the core of the apple and spines of rosemary are

left, alive

and what is language for if not to depress the tongue, to see                                  behind it

the developments glowing green with effort, as in

please do not throw us into the fire,

do not make us lick our babies in the shit-infected waters,

do not cut away

the hoods of pleasure and hope from our eyes, I know

something of development because I held my son

inside me for longer than a mother’s time, held

him like a rag over my eyes in the middle of the Christ powered bridge            and crows whipping

through the prayers of the marked down,

the discounted,

the inventories ready to tip from the shoulders of the harbor,

so many I have desired without value because how may I assist

sounds like

how may I exist

so I that might woo the doctor when my lungs overflow with the                         melting of the iron livers

of capital and the mountains I dreamed in my youth,

of galloping lights and the shredded roses of sunrise, a job

I can snap and bend to with a smile, under

the blond of the searchlight,

because my fate is to be autonomous unlike

the chitinous bodies I do not think twice about wiping away

with a paper towel, sometimes the reds of my fingers,

which as they kill

remind me of pews cracking with human salt, the gathering of it when              value runs out,

so that when a man lay on top of my throat with his whole factory,

fingernails pressing into the soft under my eyes, I did not think

it strange

or particularly wrong

or that I might miss this life by the sea of fathers who disappear before  they can be forgiven, and how I was not

terrorized by whatever the mouth had dragged up from the trenches                    then, the seaweed

jazzing its insides and the horse flesh purpling its gums, the trains crossing its dark cunt and the unwashed men inside

holding their hands out from their chests, reciting speeches composed under awnings of ice for half a burger,

a one-way ticket to the north side,