#exquero

nosebleedclub:

What will be different this autumn?

The epidermis regenerates completely roughly every twenty-seven days. A red blood cell leaving the marrow today will be destroyed in the spleen a hundred to a hundred and twenty days later. White blood cells that have not encountered a pathogen are eaten regardless after thirty days of sentry. The lining of your gut regenerates every two to five days, depending on the acidity produced by your diet.

We who walk into autumn are not entirely we who walked into summer.

Brain, bones, heart, lungs. Spleen, kidneys, liver.

Gallbladder. I feel each of them a little heavier. The muscles that move my arm — the eye beneath the closing eyelid, itself closed. At fifteen I had a mostly new body. At thirty I will be new again in that way.

My shadow keeps growing shorter. Bruised, holding-its-breath September. The green not letting go. Myself not letting go, either. Hands coiled loose in the long grasses, in stray cucumber vines. The poplars coming close in downwind. Almost-embrace.

September. 52 mHz days, deep blue days, night all around but in the wrong way, cluttering my eyebrows.

Sometimes I wonder if instead of living I’m doing it like a man a little ways south the midpoint of his sentence — waiting, empty waiting. Looking at the moon mostly (only) through windows.

Then all of a sudden I slip, a bit like going underwater, my sore feet slick with moss grime. I slip and I recall I am in movement. The downwind catches me again. Kisses the blood bedding my ears, kisses like pearls, the yellow hearts of chamomile.

The wound in my head — the fire there. It’s been burning since spring and I know now it won’t quell soon. Too much gauze, or maybe there’s saltpans, magnesium under the eye-socket, going deep into the brainstem. I thought I’d be dead by fifteen. All there’s to it is that the thought caught up to me.

I listen for birds. The fire burns with a sound a little like the tearing of sackcloth and a lot like them.

Three point one billion miles away, Pluto’s molten heart defines its geography. Its oceans melt, flow, ice — all in one breath. Arrested flux. Pale absynth green.

Change’s domain is the periphery. Everything different, and so, always the same.

nosebleedclub:

How many lives do you have left?

If a road is a vein then catacombs are arteries, sunk deep to protect some secret, vital blood. Close-air mortuaries. Granaries. Vast aqueducts.

Places lovers can touch and proof their love.

The channels running under this town — under your bare feet naked with after, after, a smouldering still wafting off you, bed-passions or an itch of the soles which like your death keeps saying go, go— don’t parallel any known road. They vivisect the wheatfield, snake through the tangled root of the hill and coil northeastward, as far perhaps as the Meridians. A thief-road, maybe. Remnant of those iron days when gold and grain and people had to be stolen back into the kingdom.

Or maybe there’s a God to it, in it, that green blood under blood — wandering about without his head, gore of the cut neck set aflame. As for me I keep talking in phosphorus: God of the brass sun, God with zinc hands. Green on dead green.

If he’s burning I’m burning above him. Trying to put myself out with rugs of heavy wool and only making summer.

How many lives do you have left?

How many do you? No future to any of us and precious little present. This maybe why I keep so well to darklands, ago,before,then. Why I’m four years pregnant with the severed hands of Gebeleizis.

How many lives do I have left. How many seconds. Each eyelash, dust-mote, each infinite and precious.

In the field, in the fire, I’m singing.

nosebleedclub:

1. enemies to lovers
2. seaside
3. teary eyed
4. old carousel
5. continued regeneration

nosebleedclub:

Lover

I don’t want any more myth around this —
I am no Dionysus (
for all the blood of me comes thick and dark from that grape country
)

nor you Ariadne,
too foolish and too lose in your laughter (
though loved as madly as she was
)
nor Odysseus,
for all you go from me (
for all I’d wait the hard decan of your salt years,
wife and island
)

and either way,
I am too death-touched to be in love with tragedy,
too much bone of the black mountain,
the rolling vinehill

that goes and goes sprawling,
taking what it likes as it likes,
clasping you close

from eye to ankle

nosebleedclub:

Your life in five words