Unmane

Eleni Sikelianos


Out from deep grass
lions would
line the streets,
lie down, &
feed

themselves to dwellers

offering up
lion heart

To eat the heart of a lying
down lion

clean
coeur de lion

clown lion
lying
human
down

in a place where one grass blade makes
the next grass blade’s shade
that grass blade made
the next grass blade’s root
that grass blade’s root
shaped it like a foot for the next
grass blade’s blade that
cut it to the quick

quick wick
of lion life
flame


lacrimal bone


I wish to speak of
the smallest, most fragile fragment
of the face, floating
in orbital space roughly
the size of your little fingernail near
the eye-corner, its bony
landmarks
help you to
cry

when you’ve lost your lover
mother
father
in the night

heart’s vapor rises to the head
flicks some speck of brain

the crying eye’s arrow 
true as a ray of the sun tipped with a photon 
shoots out

and you think
whatever folly you plot, the world
will perform it
so
overblooming with us

but I don’t want to leave you
here on earth with its geometrized urban
and agricultural cuts—give the map on your face
straight
correlation with the heliacal luminosity
of uncontaminable space—if you look up


Wrong


I want to be wrong all day long.

As wrong as flesh machines.
No fact checker, no search it.
No it and no that. 

I want to put my money in all the wrong places.
Misrecognize the most famous faces.

Tell me what

                          leaf

push it around

                                    tongue

with your

Tell me what
                                                  -dom
free or king
domed out
                                above us &

               hard to reach

                    Break the lid of it.
Don't tell me what it.