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 no one asking for anything like beauty
They offer their body like peasants offering bread
…with both hands.
I once believed mysel a maker of immortal things.
My clever sorrow polished bright as a wedding shoe…
I thought the machine was a blaring trumpet announcing my importance.
I waited for applause to bloom from skin.
and wanted the room to kneel before my insincere artistry.
But the flesh cured that.
Shook me 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 I just bend above them quietly,
a tradesman among ghosts.
The machine chatters on its single black tooth-note.
under hands that open the body’s 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.
I don’t 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 a name that can survive being spoken aloud.
By midnight my spine feels packed with wet sand.
Ink blooms beneath my fingernails like rot beneath fruit skin.
The trash bin overflows with
paper towels,
white as crusader flags.
I wash my hands in cold water.
the ink clings stubbornly in my fingerprints,
every stranger has left behind
a small durable novel read inside of me
so…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.”