I Exhume Myself

When we sleep in the barn under thirty heavy blankets, I am
never coming back.
I sleep naked with a knife in the down.
A knife is too short to stab any vital thing.
The night we met, my eyes no longer cut me in two.
I grew knives and slept on them, expanding.
I grow weak eyes where the knives had been.
From the ceiling I stared at, vertigo spilled down, hid, ripped
into mind.
Waiting for morning is not the same as sleeping.
A dream is a naked idea snapped awake.
The backward splashes of your feet running through rain.
Singing bye bye baby gauntling, Daddy’s gone drinking.
(You are not there where I have looked.)
When I raise the manhole lid, I am dead on my feet.
None of the babies come out alive.
When you come home with a live bat in your hands.
I look for a window, but go under the sheets.
I could never sleep at the back of my mind.
Dreaming is a blindness that looks back.
Walking out from a dream in the wrong direction.
Under an electric blanket on high in August.
Crawl into a bad dream backward over dirt to find a way home.
The whole family jerks awake realizing we are coverless.
Love rips into mind, hides in its own smoke.
Wait in the dark for your mother to return.
Walk into a dream where autistic wires cry you out alive.
When each night waking leaks a new ghost.
When I woke in the unadulterated dark of our car.
I woke bombing inside the race dream.
Awakened, but not yet there.
When night pushes me down its huge eyeball.
Everything apt inches toward failure.
My eyes grow backward to replace the future.
Your mother insists we take her high, stiff bed.
The ceiling crack’s habit of looking like a rabbit.
Walk with me out of the evisceration dream.
False moons swerving.
Can you turn them out?
Light twisted tight like a sheet.
When fog invades my leaving- you dream.
I stick my finger down night’s throat.
We paint the bedroom Bird of Paradise.
In the hotel bed’s bleach- stench, staring at the ceiling.
You see the same things no matter what is in front of you.
Three- chambered synaptic headless moons.
You don’t know the half of it.
You were outside hanging all the moon’s faces: kicked out,
tensile, tricked, eclipsed.
The goathead eyes photos of the dead.
When you wake, I am asleep and digging at my own throat.
In the day you say one thing, in the night you own another.
You say, look out the window.
And years later we go back, stand there.
Look at what you have given up to be with me.
I wake with red scratches on my neck.
I tell you I am in love.
You tell me you know.
But what you know is something else.
Marks like tracks down my neck.
I don’t root down into your dream.
I will not dig a fetus out of my throat.
My hands will never find it.
Digging a pit like it was something else, and singing.
Both of us stare at the same ceiling.
You explain this to me.
I almost disappear when I am in the pit.
Morning comes in the middle of night.
We dig at something lodged there.
I wake up missing want.