IN THE DESERT

I stood at the lip of the world. A voice said, "Jump."

I don't remember the real color of my skin. Dirt digs into my crevices... binds me in layers. The layer closest to me crawls. I can't remember when I didn't feel legs crawling on me... biting... things digging hot tunnels through me. When there are others and I see their faces, I can see that they are smelling me but I don't remember how I smell. I can roll on the dry, singing grass like a dog and look up and see the buildings around me and the sun sitting on top of one of them like a hot marble. At night, the water on the grass soaks through the fabric and skin that drape me. I still itch at night and I'm grateful for that.

... the normal bladder will continue to fill without causing us discomfort and at its usual filling limit will elicit nervous stimuli which we, however, can override, to expand that capacity and empty the bladder at our convenience.

Sidewalk cracked behind me like burned skin as I ran down an alley. It was standing against the brick wall staring at me. Its feet were buried - erased inside a pile of trash. It pulled a limp penis out of the open slit in its pants and, lifting it up, pointed the red knob at me. A yellow arc fell across the air and across my chest. Its eyes slitted like razor cuts filling with black blood. Its nostrils yawned wide.

"You can't even do that," it hissed. "You got to squat."

I am damaged. I am in bondage. I came to this empty place long ago.

The building was burning. Heat tightened my skin - wet leather shrinking. The flames that devoured the building reached out and licked me. A voice said, "This is a mouth that wants you. Walk into it."

The weather folds around me. I don't remember moving from one place to another. Chilled and burned...wrapped in an envelope of pain, my skin speaks to you. Muscles scream against the bone. Pain is a liquid and pools on the concrete making a bed for me. I move through hot air and I see colors floating unanchored...soft, wet things squeezed between plates of glass - pink and bottle green splashed against the concrete like violence but staying quiet as I move through the air of this place. The colors seep into me, seize and anchor in. They bud and they blossom. They are growing in me...becoming. Is this a gift from you ...a solvent for my will? My legs have moved for so long. Rain has lashed and scarred me. The sun has marked my eyes. Have I emptied myself to make a hive? Red tints the green of the leaves in the park and drips down. Cities are gray steel, they say, muddied and dim, and the color of blood is really red. I know all of that. My city is red and bleeds.

...saliva is a complex fluid; when obtained from the mouth it contains not only a large number but also a wide variety of microorganisms. The population of the mouth varies from day to day.

I recognized it when I saw it in front of the noisy station. It was waving the shorn limb in the faces of the others passing by. It said nothing - just waved the stump in their faces as though it were trying to touch them with the missing hand. The stump folded in at the wrist. The skin tight and shiny...pink like the flesh of cooked birds can be near the bones. I stood nearby and I could hear a tiny beating sound - blood rushing to the hand that used to be there and pounding against the empty wall. It saw me watching. It shoved the stump behind its back and grinned.

"What is it?" I asked. "What's wrong?"

It spit on me and giggled as I looked at the blistered liquid slipping over my knuckles and down to the street. I looked up. I couldn't see it but it had left a space in the air, a bubble filling up with wet heat and empty foreign faces.

I know your face. I could twist off an arm or a leg and find it hollow inside. I know your face...your breath on me. Can I punctuate myself? Clarify my skin,? Let you out? Let you in? Riddled I am; waiting for you. I am leaking like bread soaked in water. Sodden and swallowed by your beauty. I'm blinded like a leaf with the sun. I knelt beside him as he sprawled against the white wall. The arm was blackened and oozing against the pallid tile. The muscle had ridden the bone for so long - it was tired and couldn't fight. I contemplated the mortified limb. It trailed limp and putrid across the floor.

"Make it go away," he whispered. I held up my knife but he shuddered and there was no need. His eyes had emptied out. My brother. Translated. I wish I could follow him. The bloodied nail drops, used and useless, from my hand.

Emptiness yawned inside me. I sprawled across the rain soaked street, my legs loose and hollow and uncomprehending. I tried to roll over and the street clung to my back like sweating skin...a wet palm holding me. The dark sky opened like a pit above me. My eyes shuttered closed. The smell of burning rubber brushed my scalp. A voice said, "Sleep here."

...but I can't sleep. Objects fuzz and wiggle and scuttle giggling outside the range of my eyes. My eye sacks quiver ib the sockets, shaking, the skin jerking around the edges, the insides hot and swelling like lumped jelly. Shapes pop up in front of me and disappear like cloth pulled down through the sidewalk. I hear voices hurtling around the building I lean against the corners gone trembling and wet, melting inside the shroud of heat that my eyes travel in.

...sweat glands provide a powerful physiological mechanism for heat loss. The 2 to 3 million exocrine sweat glands distributed over the entire body surface are capable of delivering 2 to 3 kg of watery sweat per hour.

It was wearing a suit. I saw wet film spread across its yellow shiny face soaking the collar of the shirt and - dripping into the hidden fibers - translating out beneath the armpits. It stank. Its eyes flickered like insects trapped behind glass.

"I'm your angel," it said. It held out a sheet of turquoise paper that was limp in the heat. The paper felt like an eel in my hand and I dropped it. Its teeth oozed out of the oily sheen of its face and hung in the air.

"Brother," it said and vised my hand. A wound opened up around its neck like a zipper. It laughed, air bubbling from its gaping

throat, and backed into the crowd that had appeared around us like foam. The skin on my hand burned and I wanted to wash it.

Air shoved against the skin on my face. A thud moved up to my ears from the concrete. Something was pink down there. They're throwing meat again, I thought and looked down. Two small birds, naked skins puckered, were dead and rolling in the breeze. They were raw and dry. Thin skin traced with pink veins stretched across the closed eyes. A sick pit opened up inside me. Your eyes bulged like that. Is that why I picked up one of the little birds and stroked the featherless skin? Is that why I carried it in my hand for weeks hoping maybe that I could keep the bird from being dead or keep my hand's skin from burning?

There was glass shattered and scattered on the concrete each cradle and blade resting like a petal. A voice said, " Pick that up and make a sign on your skin. Pull the edge across the blue in your wrist and watch it change. The red bites and is beautiful..."

Words sink into my stomach and disappear. My stomach is open now, clean as a dried sponge. Light pours through my skin and fills me like breath but there is nothing left inside me to absorb the light. It comes out of my eyes and moves across the world and enters into things and makes them throb and sigh. I am scraped out. I am emptied out to you.

...chemically, blood is almost identical with sea water.

The white walls surrounded me. I sat on a bench waiting for help. It moved up the hall toward me. Its head was shaved and livid. Blue veins poked up beneath the skull's skin sheath. It made a clicking sound as it moved but its feet were hidden inside the metal shield of the trolley that circled it from its waist to the floor. Its arms floated like they were hooked onto strings. The skin clinging to the curve inside one elbow was bruised in circles of purple bleeding into green. Yellow skin gripped the needle that opened to a bag swinging from a metal rack beside its head. Thick red poured out of the bag through a tube and into the sucking arm. It stopped in front of me. The eyes were hollow and waiting. The white parts were yellow like the skin on its arm. Its gaze slid across me like ice on a heated spoon. I was sick looking at it and I turned my head. I felt something stab my arm and I looked down to see the needle dangling from my throbbing skin. A smear of red, like chalk, burned against the surface.

"There," it said. "You be like us." The needle fell out of my arm and blood flowed from its tip turning the white floor dark and sticky. It rolled along the edge of the metal cage surrounding it and sighed once at thew ceiling. Its eyes were hard wax. The chest stopped moving in and out. I waited for awhile and then crawled away breathing hard through my mouth and my nose.

I was standing then sliding. The brick wall left a trail on my back like kisses up and down. The sun was as hot as a tongue spreading across me. I looked down and saw the wet, empty space between my legs. The color was spreading there. The other parts were close by, resting on a pile of newspapers, coloring the paper deep red... flopping there limp as a doll. This happens when I close my eyes.

Blood stiffened in the sand like letters. A circle of darkness slapped over my eyes. Happy me. My knowing started there.

There was a bird. Round red eyes shuddered inside a feathered skull. Feathers shook against skin spread on hands like a pair of gloves. The bird trembled and was still as the hands spread

feathers apart and felt the spine of each stiff between the fingers. Sometimes fur grows inside skin. I remember lattices of metal. I remember crawling on metal stretched against the sides of wet brick walls - me crawling in the dim light. I remember my feet gripping the metal and a scaled tail wrapped around a leaking pipe. Water burned into fur and skin. I squealed and then howled. I was something bigger then, my legs broken and my belly scraping the concrete, begging to be saved into vapor and away from this. I see a face in front of me. The eyes are tinted red like blood in a glass vessel and a blue bobbin floats like ice at the center of each. That coat is like mine... like mine was. I spoke German. I wore a suit. But I felt a tap on my forehead and once on my chest and I was wrapped up to you. The tears on your cheeks run through the same grime that I know. My own dirt. Your tears cut through the hot air like a blade and make a pool for my skin. I woke up and saw the sky. I wake up every minute and I see the sky. A man standing next to me says, "The Devil is ALIVE!" and that may be true but its your face that I see. A plane glides across the sky and nine bodies are pulled out. Nine there, spinning like pinwheels. Death on a stick...spinning there...three time three. The blue is an area we share. Yanked into this. Vast and alone. Flesh and fabric lit and spinning as they come down. Down. Down to this. Their happy home. We are gelded creatures. We have made ourselves alike. The wash of red. First it beats like chains against metal and then it slows to the calmness of breath until it is as quiet as if it were gone. We want this. We do. Have you felt the wetness in the early air sinking into the joint of your knee? It feels like rust and rot as well. When you live in the air of this place...too ripe and wet...particled...noisy...damp with the sweat of others. To be dry is a blessing, dried out like something buried in the east where the wars are, where the sky curves over and under the sand. Away from this abandoned place. To sleep is a gift when

the sun is down, but my eyes are learning to be dry. I approach you broken. With nothing. My skin is a sheath. I would like to skin myself and move into the blue that rests above me like a saucer... like a veil blanketing...like a door. Blood from my broken heart would come out from my mouth. I would paint the threshold red after I went through. After I had cut my path. This place. My skin is a bubble. My skin is a cave.