The Art of Shannon Leigh

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Song: "Shosholoza"

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Yes, there are second chances but they taste wrong and waste away under your lips.

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In dreams, loving is enough; all the pretty things stay, and the small voices of love me love me love me have no purpose.

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1

I see you in the movies white cliffs, black water, shark fins slicing through the surf your topography is like a lover's features in the dark here is your mouth, rich and bloody here is your nose, your sloughing epithelials these stones they make you bleed for them I carry you in my feet, these circular callus-scars you will fill the last inch of me when I come home does my daughter rest in you will I ever find her bones

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3

1) The house is old. Our eyes meet and she raises the corner of her lip. Two lionesses. The yard is large and waiting. She paces, calls her partner. Her arm is a mural. They want this place, to fill it with their smell, their heat. We mark territory, scratching at grass with our shoes. I wish bankruptcy on her. I pray for her failure. My bed goes there, in the corner. Her nightstand, her lover's robe. I call them those lesbians. I have not been with a woman in months. I want to taste her. It's just business. I pray for her ruin. I offer wild sacrifices to gods in my yard, dancing for the deal. I dream about moving. I wonder if she lies dying, will her lover be let in. I wonder how she sees me. Straight, yuppie, markless. Willing bad credit onto her. Vodou dances for lost property. It's just business. I want her mouth. I want her dead. I want this place for us, not her and her lover. It's been so long. The things I could do to her. 2)In the fetish club the girl stretches, combats and electrical tape, and I could be a man tonight. The worst kind of man. She dances like I am not watching, and I do not know even what I would do to her, except that it would be pain, and sweat, and her sweet softness. At home, I sleep with you and think of her. Sheet plastic and duct tape. My body's currency. I would never dance like that. I know what these hands can do.

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My love is a rotary engine, my love is a chess square, my love is a july multiplex. My love is a swingset, my love is a teenage werewolf. My love is china. My love is a summertime cathedral, my love is the way you bodyslam life. My love is a collapsed vein, a marguerite, an invisible baseball. My love is a tourniquet, a geyser. My love is an apple pipe. My love. A sea chest.

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For the people planning to picket Heath Ledger's funeral  because he did Brokeback Mountain Christ, what have they done to your hands they have filled them with placards and sewn up your tendons with cotton I remember you used to bleed. This is not my Calvary, the M-4 in your arms held stiffly with broken shoulder arched this is not my cross, at its foot I don't remember those small skulls listen closely. They have fed your starving with salt and sulfur AIDS and typhoid your birthplace is the grave of some woman or some  small child and they say this is righteousness. A child stuck with needles rubbed with cocaine and fucked by her mother's man a woman cut out of herself, her dark dreams spread open and excised, in India white women pay the poor to carry their children this is the world for which you died that sacrificial offering that paved these bloodrun streets your sons are holding makeshift grenades and bringing knives into grade schools your daughters are bleeding out in crowded waiting rooms and God, what have they done to your words they are tattered, buried in shrouds of silver this is not my God who was a man who did no great thing but speak  to the poor and outcast and then die raging at the fate he wished he knew, he had skin then bright fire-eyes and open hands scar-dotted and waiting born of an unmarried woman who said to save herself that she was holy and made him believe, those hands are not signposts  that cross is not a billboard with a picture of a baby that blood is only blood like ours, Christ what have we done to you you simple country carpenter you perfectly timed suicide you lover of the blasphemous listen closely: don't come back. We will see your feet and call you beggar  we will feed you with the fat the rich discard and your teeth will rot away you will be denied shelter and we will not care even enough to kill you you will always deserve it. You will be freak, john, junkie, you will catch lice from shelter pillows and we will call you bum the refugee camps will have no room for you the buses will not stop and street miracles will not even get you airtime don't come back when you hug men you will be called  faggot when we hear you preach  we will call you Jew at least that has not changed and when we come for you, there will be no trial only an ambulance restraints and syringes. Slowly you will forget you are God and write mad poetry on your skin with felt-tip pens the nurses will call you quiet and we will never remember your name. I remember you bled once and I was too young to believe it was for me do you still remember wood beneath your palms, do you still love the starving and the lame or do you wish for a lesser death wondering how we can possibly believe this has all been for you if you open up your hands will you be home again don't wait for us. You've already seen what we think of your forgiveness.