Elegant cannibal,

In this moment of my yearning

Split open my belly and lay me bare.

Think me bait for the untried and

Untired of object and subject.

Have me as a ripened, few-legged millipede

Or perhaps one who some time ago lost hold

Who slipped from a succulent bract into a Lethe

Then sundried on an intervening rock

Moved only in spasm, impulse, instinct.

Ending here with you.

Spit me back into my face and let me die here,

Or rather chew me forever in your mix.

 

Each of your folds is a rice strands

Bent like steel and struck like linen.

Artifact, you devour the whole scene

With that geometric maw that doesn’t gape, 

Doesn’t threaten, merely consumes.

 

Animate.

 

Climb a leaf and pull at passages.

Grind reminiscences into desirable bits.

Obscure with the simplicity of materials

And the specificity of careful handwork

The object that vicinity gives voice

And mix this olia (or is it plethora?)

With my blood and respire through thin

Lifelines spilling and then congealing

On a desperate dispositional plane.

 

Involuntary, rigid, the implied swivel

Of your parapeted neck has fixed your eye-pods on a branch.

Let this recognition impel your limbs akimbo

To paper dripping into cocoons

And incubate a hundred progeny, a thousand incidentals,

The very lovely things that make one fear,

The very fearful things that make one love.

 

Multiply

From a rude birth out of a thin blank sheet,

A duo-dimensional, a terrible and vast flatness.

Produce a tentacle there and a wing here.

Metamorphose as light as death,

As balanced as terror, as abstracted as grace,

Into a resurrection of line upon line –

A thing in space, a mass, a form, a value.

 

Occupy

 

Your most natural habitat

Of bound canopies, of living levels.

Innuendo of breathe, you are

A suggestion of pulse. You are

An intimation of hands. And

 

The only humanity

In angles and tucks

In one side, one way,

The other, the other,

Is an appetite

For your own kind.

​

By Jim Lipp