(once, on the pin of a night,
past the hours of my sleeved thinking,
my hung curtains pulled out of me
a belly of pitches,
and a wringing arm
birthed itself from the curtain lips.
it's arm reached out, training
the cotton along the magnet floor
to point out the earth's pine-forest
and tend towards my tounge, as fingers,
long painted nails with iron shells
tweezed at my toungue:
and then i fell.
except, leaving those blood-scented rods,
my head falling to bed,
steel bursts into the air. in melts the walls,
with screeching gears and shining lead,
and edging blades on rusting scrap:
all the razors which it shed
shot like iron starlight
through my dying ear;
the up-spin beast, pulling my world up with it
sent forging down its lightning field
to thread up the blood in my ear,
my curtains beating with its wings,
to the engine of its song.
in my dreams, i might have thought
that the tissues of my toungue
could deflect the shells of nails
lining the ridge of its hand.
but, cut by that industrial noise,
a thought shot through my head:
that its own gears had turned themselves
and the angel away
from me: that even as i lay
i was a threat to this machine
so it scraped itself together
and built itself the sun
and all the floor it came to shun.)