Dung Layers

1.

The deepest hole to live in, bury this part alive.

Can I tell you, and you’ll believe me? That these years spent silent

were forming a dung cocoon, a makeshift grave, a place to bury happiness

because I was afraid of it?

Hurtling balls of light, gaseous huge nuclear factories, couldn’t outrun me. And excuses run out,

This thing is big and it’s not happiness,

not really as angry and sad as it is,

but it’s big, it’s big and I’m frightened. To bury it,

push it down, keep throwing tablespoons of powder over it

like someone who pours powder over things coffee creamer ash bone flakes

Could I tell you about it

without it come hurtling from my insides, turning me into

a red meat burrito, consuming everything, an amorphous star,

a burning planet. A black hole is where I’ve stopped.

Afraid of moving,

moved or it’ll shake, it’ll lumber to the outside of it’s cage

keep it in a hole,

covered in layers of human dung, mental waste, filth

distraction, sedimentation, lack of inertia, as if it’s own dense mass is enough to sink it down,

down far enough for it to be gone forever.

I want it to be a flame,

but suns get denser with age,

but I don’t know what it is.

It could be a matted knot of tears

solemn and cancerous, molted and glutinous -- slag heap of cold spunk

waiting to fall and

cover me in ancient snot.

2.

My mother used to talk about layers, how if you pulled all of us

back, any of us, layer by layer,

sheets of fat and bone, skin, teeth,

claws, old girlfriends, drunks, then what would be beneath?

Would it just be jelly, she would say?

No, Yeats was right on this one.

Something horribly lumbering to be born, a hideous

grotesque dung egg, s**t sack, cum dumpster,

everything ugly, everything real,

and it stinks, (oh lord the smell),

and it moans, quakes.

I wanted something beautiful,

but perhaps this horrible body

is all we have, this gibbering mound I’ve buried so long is mine,

me on the inside, so --

come out, come out little one.

Bring your dirty dung shell, no one minds the smell (oh god the smell),

break open that enough so we can get a look at you.

And by we, I mean me, so I can see

what I really look like after years

of being buried in this s**t.