After Prince
The voices of reason tell us how to drown
the sounds of innocence
like 17 million grains of salt inside our blood streams.
Listen. Don’t blame me. I’m preserving
the apricox in a jar made for gasoline. For throwing.
Now I’m drying butterfly wings
because they are the prettiest weapon
against reason. Now I’m damaging my eyes
and papering over the silky drawings on the wall.
I now harness the violence of doves,
learning how to pronounce their alphabet
by burning paintings of saints inside
my pretty hotel room. All the dove songs
are about escape. My children haven’t escaped
from the promised land yet. They are waiting
for it to burn down. I’m waiting for them
to steal the guns before I make them leave. Leave.
Now. I just heard a gunshot from down the street!
I’m still alive. I’m home. I’ve written my name
on the walls of this house as if to disfigure
the architectural splendor. I’m trying
to prove a point about language, about the body,
how it moves through structures that want to
contain it. I’m listening to the breathing
from the other side of my bed. I have a feeling
that the angels are growing more electrical
as I rip apart my wife’s beautiful blue dress
to make a new voice for myself. To wander
the universe I need to be able to speak
clearly in the hour of the kiss
about the violence of language. I need to sing
the gouge song almost like a lullaby
for my children, while the cops enact the law
as a kind of puppet theater of reason.
All the puppets are torn to pieces, the puppets
are all just the hands of the masses.
The hands are manicured for the occasion.
The theater tells me to escape
from the clutches like a million doves.
By this point my voice seems to sparkle
and my purity is almost knifelike.
The air is asleep. The minerals on my skin
are alive. The paintings on the walls are worth
the gold they’re painted on. God is worth
the skin he’s painted on. Every vessel is open,
every blood cell is paradising through me.
The annunciation is taking place
in a painting of a torso. I love to drink champagne
inside the world’s rancid heart. The doves
keep singing about it. The heart. How they want
to devour it for me.