First: seize the world as your subject matter.
Understand that its grids, its grit, its effluvial patterns
can be shaped into fourteen unwavering lines. Next,
imagine that you’re M. Buonarrati, acquiring a chunk of granite
so pearlsheened, translucent, you glimpse beneath its stippled ice
a magnificent something struggling to draw its first painwracked breaths.
Then, tap with your icepick, scratch with your pencil
the imperfect surface, crack and dig, scribble and mutilate
until the ephemeral entity you claim as your progeny
pushes out drenched and wet, slippery and hot-bloodied,
a beautiful being you savor balanced on the roughnesses of your two
cradling palms, in the recesses of your multileveled mind that created it.

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sprouts, suddenly, piranha teeth. The morning’s made
for sleeping. She angles her head onto mountainous white pillows;
they cradle her neck, the gritty seams splicing it;
her dirty black hair, fanning across fabric,
creates phosophorescent rainbows of filth I long to stroke.
I’m always with her on those bleached, dead mornings
when she sleeps: I hover, then, over the bed, a quick sliver of light that flickers,
shivers, glows, Arctic-ephemeral, shedding a warmth that steals
under her chin, steadies her trembling throat. “Breathe, Sweetie,”
I whisper; her eyes open and close faster. Faster. I never know
what her mind’s camera records. Never suspect what sharpening
memories claw her inner eyes. Her sickness, like a laser,
shapes and hones her. Her gaunt boldy tenses; she rolls over
on the mattress, clings to sweaty sheets,
her floe-luminous eyes fragmented with shards and ice.

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