• Vol. 03
  • Chapter 12

Sphinx

are you speaking with my mouth? are you speaking with my dirty mouth? sliding into me at a painful and necessary intersection, this is how we occupy the same point in space: i will kill you. not so recombinant but enduring community, when a boy who is a girl, a sphinxing boy, is always slipping off the eyeball, such a womanly blue boy and with redder hair like a dirty-talking sunset. like her i am picturesque isolationist terrorism. riddle me that. over here persons are lambent as anemones, persons sway in the dark stir of the sea erotically, light dark persons and we say abide with me. in your fairness and my stupidness abide, in that yellow dress, in that hateful shirt abide, abide in your working and in my not working, in your all-levelling colourlessness (and in mine) abide, lie and when you do so abide. there is a moistureless desert which abides, there is a petrified wood which abides, in them are houses suddenly abandoned, the planets pass over them and abide. summers of biding and abiding, for in the winter we die. so if to say cedar is to smell cedar, then what am i? if a bird is a snake and a lion is a girl then get your eye off my eye! keep that mouth away from me! you wear a face of quietly sad dislocation because you do and i am off-broken, drifting above vague, gloaming anemones because i am. when the voice that ends me calls it calls like i do, traumatised, needy, righteous and raging. the sphinx is the beast of peace i sent to devour you, with just your head left, sticking out.
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