atlas, crushed under mount carmel

and left with the sawing flesh: a hookwormed pockmark fumes vestige pains above the gash birth tore out of him with a tilt and painful cords ten-thousand days past; stringing along the rest of his beads, days, ticks of the moon, vaporous and unsound, his tastes widened through lecherous caverns accorded by springs and dripping, drunk timidities of heart. seas, fooling a shine, woozy with brine, drop off. falling, milk from the teats of its screaming, infatuated fish skims the roof, dipping to their ceiling glass at the pinpoint shoes; somber, muffled god-shapes in chorus and hazel lights: sepia palisades of fifty's jazz, all diluted eyes and strong-breathed dreaming. anonymous, deliberate. he tugged their tendons at night: gnashing his teeth, smothered by deep, raging supplications, and gave no fright to the dancing moors behind his fingers, black stones smoothed and sharpened, a weapon, sacked with spears and javelins naked, spent: their small, beat-up waterboy. disintegrate, the silhouette talk and a lonesome acolyte barefoot in fair, sandy cliffs the shape of a crude cradle, circling half of his loss, grim and unforgiving. last: her talk was born of scraggy tinder, agitated and alarmed: "adapt?! where will i find the money? courses? drinks? this lifestyle i cannot pursue, you-, fly little bird, you're too old for mama's wings." at days' end, he still burns with want, so he picks up a lighter, clicks, and loses into the acorn's loose umber flush, chasing after its privileged, crinkled huts; he hunts remote islands where natives still crucify and build their altars. he mills shale calves, shading and scruffing the sand away, tasting their broken, piercing obsidian like ghosts to water; for he, in his name, remains the life of an icon. at nights, he smolders in rain before a perfect shame casts lips into small blisters of room temperature, the sighing, rolling mass of mountains amid shifting plates. he is strong to the dissipation of his manic, fevered sparks.