an orange bloom at dawn
behind the corpse of pinto’s father strewn on train tracks
a bird caught in his hair
the gasp of body vs. machine
drained fluids out of the egg pinto glowed in
his mother’s belly
his mother’s head
would never be the same
the moon like an overgrown infant
crushed her husband
“but pinto, you are the sky”
she would say
after dropping pinto on the floor
dragging & bruising the yellow soul
that made her husband kill himself
pinto is my lover
i tell my friends about the beak he simulates with his hand when he contacts the dearly departed
i haven’t given up flying with pinto
despite my fear of an invisible population in our room
bodies shimmer in pinto’s cornea, dust or blood
with or against us
i make a beak when i slide my hand inside pinto’s anus
his muscles emit rays, pulsating round my fingers
extracting from my wrist another bird body
to pry open the great wormhole in our room
who told me to love an eggshell
who made me release the crows
on a pillowy night who handed me scissors so i would spill the stuffing
feathers the black of oil
they taste like money on my tongue
it is dollars pinto wants or says he wants
though he considers himself a spiritual guide
his mother, black and indian, bled down to him a sky aflame with genocide
it rained toucans whose feathers were already ashen
there was not a child who did not collect
a big beak
to open & close at will
sucking colors back into feathers that no longer exist
but could be imagined on a national holiday
like an extinct tribe
a rose in my mouth
in my garden with my gun
i pull the trigger & explode my heart
more haze than blast
to petal downy chicks
with a blanket of my guts
on days when i kill myself it is not difficult to soar with pinto
the earth just another point on my spine
the unicorn just a clarification of pain
i believed in the blood that spurted from my eyes
into the eyes of a doctor
so neither of us could see
what pearly thing was wedged in my solar plexus
i continued to bear children via my uterus of birds
each child a pegasus
designed to slice heavens & nick the face of god
he who syphilizes the future
he who gives me a lion as a lover, a beige sac in my mouth
like some half-split sun drooling light i’ll never drink
of course the stds aureoled pinto’s head
we were becoming divine
his claws on my lithe white flanks
the sun rocking & ripping my clouds of speech
deforming the names of our children who carry this fracture within
spermless shafts of light, their bodies
pinto says i am his horizon and my jaw cracks
i want to flood his face with my blood
his eye ripped out, the blood of a branch in my throat
lodged precisely where his penis should massage me
in homage to a gay earth mother swathed in pelts and pearls
observing our via negativa
sanctifying amazons of thirst
upon pinto’s belly i pray for a placental crater in our room
everything is suddenly too wet
walls caked in mud
saliva in my heart as it tries to speak back
to some forlorn, drippy spirit shedding foreskin
sugar cane juice and light blue eggshell
i know better than to give up
on death’s ejaculations
the curtain no longer paper
into pinto’s little bill i shove my hand
making his throat convulse from my thrusting
yes, the gay earth mother says
you must fist him in the mouth to find a way into his entrails
the dagger in the nest where
he was stabbed right out of the egg
pinto and the dream of the unified jungle
pinto and the misdiagnosed neurosyphillis
pinto and the hiv he hid from me
out of the wheelchair he rolled down the stairs
where the air looked like a window
i, a warrior at the bottom of the stairs
my tropicalia garb my plastic butterfly mask
my wooden glass-cracking dagger
because of the virus’ sudden visibility
i could mutate into pinto’s mother
the world clicking at us like the maw of a gator
i felt wings once more under the skin on my back
pinto fucked me like a child
i learned to wrap myself round his veins
vines twisting and snapping off any blackened limbs
so numerous chickens could
grow out of his body in disfiguring protrusions
pinto quivered
hologram and heart of palm
a white core, oblong, promising germination
a thunderbolt like a bridge
to everything that flies into our vortex
to die and be born, waves of worm and flesh
impregnating my face cracked again
on a crucifix