snailhood

February 13, 2022

I want the chance to write until my fingers bleed. Life is weird.

I’m always struck by the weight of adoration I have to give to something mysterious and soft. There are thousands of rabbits hopping freely from their boroughs and warrens
and I’m looking for the runt: the shy, tentative one whose senses need time to ingest the scene.

My eyes are perched just above the water, searching for a playmate.

I don’t know if it’s possible for me to act normally amongst the rest of my kind.
Bits of rat poison.
I wish the canopy had bats.

I have hardly been cradled before I know I am ready for a new body.
I am a tender blob of snailhood leaking out of its shell.

When the sun hits just right …
My mouth is a wishing well … I don’t think I ever will die.

I am the cloaked silhouette in the lush,
the one I feared when entering the wood tonight.

I am not afraid, so the hounds do not raise their hackles,
instead cross their paws and nuzzle into the crooks of the lush ferns spilling

All my gentle, sexy woodland friends know
I haven’t come to drink blood or perform sacrifice

Only to soak beneath the moon and touch myself,
and give the earth bits of my ecstatic body.

Blood has been dripping from me since yesterday,
and I take it in my hands and give it to the forest green.

Angel dog writhes beside me, performing her own worship of the dirt;
We both howl as though we were feral, crickets chirping like a pleased crowd.

I am a tender little snail blobby, leaking from its shell.
Reading poems makes me cry, and I wish to be also the lullaby for an ache.

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