Another modernist tattoo walk-poem.

The needle worries the flesh like a blue fly trapped in summer milk

the room sweats its sharp alchemy…

green soap, singed metal, rain steaming from wool coats.

a little kingdom of electric murmurs

under the jaundiced eye of the lamp.

They come in carrying weather beneath the ribs.

A butcher with dockworker hands.

The woman smelling of cloves and hospital corridors.

A boy whose mouth hardeneds each time he says mother.

Not one of them innocent.

and not asking for beauty exactly.

They offer the body like peasants offering bread

with both hands.

Once, you believed yourself a maker of immortal things.

You with your clever sorrow polished bright as a wedding shoe…

You thought the machine was a blaring trumpet announcing your importance.

You waited for applause to bloom from skin.

You wanted the room to kneel before your insincere artistry.

But the flesh cured you of that.

Shook you like a dead pigeon.

Skin is older than vanity.

It cares not about genius.

It takes the needle like dry fields take rain…

barren of gratitude and without complaint.

So now you bend above them quietly,

a tradesman among ghosts.

The machine chatters on its single black tooth-note.

under your hands the body opens its book of scars…

rope-white ladder marks,

the shiny coin of a cigarette burn,

stretch marks pale as river tributaries seen from an airplane at dusk.

A woman asks for a eagle over the place her drunked raged husband kicked her.

An old man wants numbers marching down his wrist.

dates on gravestones.

A girl gets a fig branch because

someone once loved her beneath one.

You do not ask too many questions.

Life has already interrogated them enough.

Outside, the trams scrape red through the wet streets,

dragging their chains of tired office workers and drunks

the churches brood in their stone sleep

and dogs bark at nothing visible.

But here beneath the buzzing…

pain changes temperature.

It’s given edges.

A border.

and name that can survive being spoken aloud.

By midnight your spine feels packed with wet sand.

Ink blooms beneath your fingernails like rot beneath fruit skin.

The trash bin overflows with

paper towels,

white as crusader flags.

You wash your hands in black water.

the ink clings stubbornly in the fingerprints,

every stranger has left behind

a small durable novel inside you.

so, perhaps, when all is said and done, this is the work.

Not self-expression…

(what a thin, hungry phrase.)

Not rebellion.

The world has turned rebellion into advertising.

No..

just this strange human trade

where one wounded animal

leans over another wounded animal,

touching and hurting

to say with sincere lips

“I know.

I know.”