Strawberries

There’s been a mistake.
You didn’t expect this glitch.
This vanishing point
of a private murmuring city.
This fumbling
in a void of spreading
formlessness
(they told you it would
be a flower, not a slit).
Greedy mouth,
how many fingers
can you swallow?

In the movies, you would
unzip her out of her dress
and she is sexy alabaster,
leaning against the stairs,
a sell-out pimping her nipples,
readying them for your touch.
In real life, she is tired
of the metaphors – earth
and mother and whatnot.
In real life, ecstasy is far
from pretty, a groaning sickness
spasming on the carpet.

You are quickly learning
about the revolution that
brews beneath her flesh –
a whispered language of
rite and ferocity and the
invisible mountain she carries.
That to sleep,
you must lock away
your inheritance.
To emerge,
a world must unlearn itself,
then flood, then burn.

When the twitching stops,
you uncork her
(of course, she is
a bottle of wine to you)
and pour out the paraffin
from her mangled bones.
Flickering tongues
from hell lick the salt
off her thighs.
No pain felt she.
Burn’d like one burning
flame together.

You went looking for strawberries,
instead you found the manic whore,
the universe’s relentless core.