THE FRONTIER

" Jet Rips Open"

The newspaper was limp in my hand. It smelled like an empty bottle.

<

I see an arm punctured by three metal rods. The rods are clean steel. There are things reflected in the rods and if you could get close, these things would become clear as though they were leading a life inside the metal separate from the one that you know. Th rods point out of the arm toward the train's bland and creamy ceiling. A longer rod braces them across the top holding the arm in place. Each time the train stops, the rods bump against a metal pole and I want to hold your arm away and keep it safe. Does metal sing in the bone after that? Can you taste the metal in your mouth, sweetheart? Blood crusts around the holes that the rods make and skin peels away from the crusts like burned paper. You can put a hole through paper and see the sky...you can do this...like you were living inside of a box.

Sounds poke through the walls but that doesn't matter because sound is thick in this place - anyway - like miles of water. Wind enters, through window cracks and plows through smoke draped in the air. I can hear paper scraping the walls. Pictures are taped to the walls that I move my lips across at night, feeling my way in the dark. Metal pierces the black air outside and the smell of vinegar fills my nose like a needle pushing through something soft and sobbing with nerves. Chunks of the wall have fallen out and if you could pick them up, they would crumble in your hand. There's a hole in the wall where light comes through like a spike...warming me where I stand.

The bloodied nail falls from my hand. I want to know the surface that my blood is painting. I want to see vapor coloring air as though the air was cloth or white sand. I want light to travel to the places that my nail has marked. I am transfixed in this place. There is a membrane in place around me. I want blood to cover it. I want light to penetrate this...a ragged envelope that I could step out of.

I remember a tent that I went into at the carnival. A naked woman stood in front of us holding two snakes that wrapped their bodies around her arms. Each of the snakes was biting a shoulder and blood ran down the woman's skin and pooled at her feet. I saw this. She looked out at the crowd and smiled as if she didn't care that her blood was showing. She looked at me as though I were one of her eggs. When she looked at me, the tent was gone and the sky was colored with bands of red and yellow and green and blue and violet.

I looked down and I saw the same colors pooling around my feet. When I looked at the woman again, the snakes were coiled around her head like a turban. Her eyes were shooting beams into the crowd and as each person fell, the body melted and made another puddle of color. They made a garden for me out in the cold air.

"Over Pacific;"

Pieces of it the newspaper were drifting in water.

I see a man standing against a brick wall. His head is shaved. He keeps his eyes down. There are blue letters tattooed on the top of his head. The tattoo say "PO". His clothes are white and the cloth flutters against the brick like steam. He holds out a blue bowl like a sky cupped in his hand. The bare skin of his feet looks raw against the cold concrete. Blue is surging to the top of the skin and I want to carry the feet away with me to a warmer place.

I was hollow inside for a long time. Gutted. I'm surrounded by noise and fire. I can stand inside a brick shell and feel the black heat sear my hand as I press it against the wall. A dog came up to me and licked the dirt on my hand. Then, it bit me because it could see that I would never pretend to be safe in this place. The dog's mouth left two marks...one crescent riding the top of my hand...the other below.

The dog watched me as I burned the skin that it had marked. The fire leaves a kiss as warm as a mother and it hurts. I have nothing. I am always remembering what is going to happen. I want to walk into the fire that I see in the distance. I want to go to the other side of it and feel my body come apart like a fired pot split down the middle. I want to go out of it and up like steam...red in the air. I want to see the baked skin beneath me, the pieces rocking in the searing wind.

I saw a head on a plate at the carnival. The head floated on top of a greasy liquid that was greasy and covered with swirls of gold and red and purple and green. The head's eyes were closed. There was no hair on the head. The exhibit was labeled THE HEAD OF THE PROPHET and people would put coins in the plate and ask questions. I looked at the head and I fell in love with it. I wanted to hold it - put it under my arm and carry it away with me so that I could keep it safe. I wanted to kiss the head so I dropped two quarters in the oily water, but instead of asking it if I could kiss it, I asked it where it had come from. The liquid in the plate bubbled up and over the edges. It turned into blood. I saw blood washing around my knees and all the people at the carnival were floating beneath it...hairless and sleeping with their mouths and eyes closed. The head was smiling. A crescent of light squeezed out from between its lips expanded in the air and swallowed me. I lifted my hand and saw bones glowing through the skin. The heat coming out of the head's mouth dried the blood and the floating people disappeared. I was

standing in the empty tent with blood caked on my legs and I was crying because I had seen what my real life was going to be and my money was gone and I was alone.

"9 Fall to Death"

I found pieces of the paper scattered around a body that cooled on the concrete...absorbing the blood that cooled there too.

I see glass falling around me. I look up and I see bodies falling through the windows of the torched building. The colors in their clothes bleed into the glass that they fall through. They seem like lost lovers to me falling down like bullets or messengers. Sounds knot the sky and the ground buckles under my feet. The bodies rest on the ground...twisted and curved or straight as blades.

I go here. Colors line the walls like a catalog of lives. Glass lines the edges and the corners where planes collide. My skin has a vivid presence here. It is waiting. It's a bridge. It vibrates in the middle...across the middle. It could disappear in an instant. I smear myself across the glass like paint.

When I woke up and I was holding a straight piece of glass in one hand and a curved piece of glass in the other. I looked at each

and wondered which one to use. I opened my hands and the glass fell away, each piece leaving its mark across my palm.

I saw a curtain at the carnival. The stripes on the curtain were yellow and purple. The fringe at the bottom was green. There was a red carpet covering the floor of the stage. I could see this in a space

between the curtain and the floor. On top of the carpet a pair of black high heels twisted a piece of blue fabric as the feet inside them swiveled back and forth. When the curtain opened, we saw a body standing in front of us. It was naked but blank - like smooth molded plastic. The head was covered with long red hair theat curled down over the face. The body turned its back to us and swung the hair back and forth and this made me feel as though the air was moving around inside of me...moving inside of a large hollow space

that was melting at its perimeters. I imagined that I could feel my own hands moving over the smooth empty parts of the body up there on the stage and I could feel that the parts were like jelly inside a plastic bag not hard like I had thought before. I decided to leave but before I stood up it turned and I could see its face. The face was a smooth featureless blank but I felt that it was seeing me and talking to me...telling me to stay. It picked up a dildo from a pink plaster column. The strap went around its waist and more straps went between its legs. When he looked back up at me, he smiled and I remembered the smile from a picture that I'd seen. The smile in that picture curves up like the tips of it were trying to reach the nose

that curves up and into straight eyebrows and beautiful weird eyes that curve out at you as you look at him with his finger curving up and there isn't anything but wilderness behind him...ruined buildings that point up too and disappear into the smutty fog. He bent forward and picked up the breasts that were lying on top of the column. When he strapped them on, the landscape behind him disappeared and the same face smiled out at me from a photograph in my hand. On the stage, she pulled a black leather mask over her head. She had the same face. I missed her.

We unzip our skins. Our skins are twisting and changing so we let air in underneath. We treat air like a lover and we let it in. We move through this and into a changed place. Dripping red habits. We are marked to each other. Cutting gives us our name. We like razors. That is a cut that speaks. I was cut thirty times and I was sealed to this place but I could feel you prying open each cut and entering in. I could feel you ripping the seams of my skin to make something new for me to wear. I looked up at the blue sky that surrounded me. I painted red across it with my fingers and nine bodies fell down through the spaces that my hands had made. Nine bodies falling through the screaming blue. Will they kiss you tonight instead of me? The ground here is scorched and crunchy with bones. The world is huge and light slips across me like air making room for my skin.

Stars hang in front of my eyes with tips like blades. Scars of thirty years open across my skin...open mouths to be washed as clean as sand. The world stretches out beyond my outstretched hand. My skin is the rim of my knowledge. My skin is what speaks.