"What Rough Beast"

“What rough beast” rapes again on my honor and door?
I cannot shake living free. She clings as parasite to
time before shells when my bare body of compressed ego
in an instant of quiver, reason and fallacy awakes.
Are we fake? Where does that specie we call event
and tragedy live when the roads are broken by
incomprehensible rivers? --Every plot arranged as
an incomplete film – marigolds pitch inward and stung
from fine, wretched poison shaken with salt and pepper
on an open roll, while Zinnia, a call girl,
with a brazen pitch of breasts rides up our legs
to tempt delusion. There is no mercy in terror.
There is nothing you can say to your abuser
that will empty them of the reasons she slid cross
my eyes and covered my slipping knots
with her mouth and the perfectly formed gams
quaking unknown to her desire for relief.

How do we grow pleasure as a womb covering fingers
and lips? How do we escape that leap from the rim
of the planet or star, or mother and father to brag
about high, grandiose marvels, and to pretend truth
and glory are willful and never haphazard?

When my mother touched my parts I was dissolved.
I sank on my knees and prayed to demons with teeth
that cut and bruised my memory of perfection that
middle road before birth when we are innocent.

If I had never remembered the names of the beasts would
I have been safe from the fragmentary grenade of guilt?