sucker

do you love me or the memory of me

when you slap theatrically at mosquitoes when they bite your neck or the small of your wrists

and ankles in the grass

Pitching a tent in the wilderness

underneath a wild switchbush full of thorny bramble and hairs of stinging nettle or fiddlehead ferns that are edible but difficult to know how to cook due to unorthodoxy

Oh my god:  leave me alone

have a sandwich when you look at me

don’t tell me a story about sandwiches

don’t say anything to me that you have already said

keep it fresh, keep it fresh

the sandwich do not go to the beach

to the sand

strand, where the beachcombers go to look for gems and shells

from shipwrecked mollusks (the dead, the dead)

eat me by the water in small gulps under the sodden logs and planks full of lichen and barnacle

scratching at naked thighs like a clam on my naked thighs

gore

nose your supple proboscis into my ear and, ductile, make it swim in the folds

the folds

of my brain which are sodden with sex

memory and sex

dreams of the beach and your sandwiches

and the last effigy of your self worth

that you sacrifice at my feet, Raymond Cline.

I don’t hate you because I refuse to hate everyone. I refuse to hate anyone. It isn’t a special designation. Do not become a delusion of grandeur, please. You possess no virtue. You possess no virtues.

Who are you, with no hair, to wear the comb I bought for you with the money I got from the watch you bought the chain you sold your hair for.

IT isn’t enough ever, more is required.

You aren’t what you claim

you aren’t what you declaim

you aren’t what you claim

to be or to possess, that is.