First love sonnet #2

My worm, my private monster who resides
between my eyelids and my itching eyes,

you are still here. My bloated spider, crouched
above my brain, your needle-slender legs
tap sonnets on my skull; a silk-spun pouch
wraps warm around a hundred thousand eggs.

My parasite, your viney body binds
my tortured tongue, caressing fingers wind
along my throat; your double hooking teeth
are nestled in my voice, and underneath

my crawling skin, between my hips, I feel
you still, at times more clamorously real
than any lover whose keen lips transform
to yours, whose trembling hands take on your form.

Judith (2)
The flesh resists my penetration but
there's one soft place beneath the heavy chin.
This then will be my entrance point: I surge.
We two are pressed so close your desperate hands
are scrambling on my skirt like drunken crabs
your breath still slow and stuporous and sweet
and rank with wine is snarling the sheets
around our legs. And when an eager louse
goes skittering across the hand that seized
you by your greasy goatwool hair I heave.
But swordweight sweat-slicked palms wet tent-trapped heat
I am gray owl wings in hunting flight.
Your head rolls heavy, dull-ripe-thumps like fruit
nudge-bumps my foot before I scoop you up.

Apoptosis
I will be an inconvenience from now on.
We die like cells, politely; we gather ourselves in.
We fold our organs up in clean canopic packages
in waxed white paper labeled kidneys lungs etcetera.
Our empty fair and unpolluted shapes
are neatly boxed to go.
Enough, enough, enough. Start dying ugly.
O let's be terrible as staring wings.
When stars die,
they burst their insides out
so should we
so should we make it bitter arsenic and vomit choke up apples black and bloated tongues and fear
and fear us, gentlemen.

I think of you, o Judith, as I lie awake.
I will not be a cold Lucretia, nor a saint,
her tongue cut out: I will not wrench my ecstasy
from silence or self-sacrifice. Why should I be
like anyone but gray-eyed Judith, who perfumed
herself with spice and sandalwood, and then bitumed
the sheets with monster's blood? You carried home his head
as though it were a cabbage or a loaf of bread
bought in the marketplace. I only hope the sweat
that ran into your stinging eyes did not prevent
your satisfying anger when you saw those hands,
like drunken crabs that scrambled at your skirt, release.
If woman's vengeance must be tenderer than man's --
at least, then, Sister, we're exacting to appease.

There's nothing irreducibly complex:
a driven randomness details
the corkscrew of flagellar tails
and parasites impel us to have sex.

So grind flagella into dust: you'll find
old Yersinia's spare needle;
when she isn't plaguing people
she blindly tinkers, as do all our kind.

We living things are ad hoc engineers:
the human eye sees upside down;
the brain must flip the world around.
The skies are not fixed Matryoshka spheres.

I tend to mince my words, and exercise
strict posture when I eat: my arms and eyes
ahead, my feet laid flat, and back fixed straight,
I pepper every phrase before I taste.
But I should shave my head, be vulture-bald
and impolite, extract the offal all
the lionesses and prim epicures
disdain, and tear intestines and get fur
stuck in my teeth. The best are redolent
of bloat with microbes and with metaphors --
the choicest, juiciest of words ferment;
putrescent dainties please detritivores.
Or else a fungus, with tremendous roots,
and rotting earth will birth unlovely fruits.

How strange! The heavens stopped like freight trains stop,
those sobbing, grinding planetary wheels
-- that metal sound that makes the marrow drop
down to the bottom of one's bones. I reel
at first; you kiss as though you're never sad,
and there I was, my feet and eyes on stones
so old they move arthritically, their bones
begrimed with soot -- and you, an oread,
sun-crowned! My daydreams love to torture me
like boys who pull the wings off flies, to see
their hopelessness -- and so I walked, when you
dreamed up yourself, and dropped white asters through
your fingers, so they fell like stars; their scent
trailed after them like light in their descent.