headless chicken

i will soil the rug and spoil the curry

are you ever afraid that you will forget and all that will remain is the beating-bleating-bleeding thing and a jackrabbit's impulse and your hands and then you won't know why you walk with your weight fastened around your neck and when a kid sprints past you to her mama you will not know how to look at her and smile in a way you would have wanted to be smiled at a long time ago and when a voice screams from across the parking lot MONSTER you will know not to yell I AM NOT A MONSTER but you will hide in your jacket and run back to your apartment on the foggier side of town and avoid all your mirrors and one day you will forget to not look and what you will see is a mottled gash down your temple parting into nothingness, it is not skin it is not flesh but a chasm a whistling vacuum and you imagine men playing cards, writing scriptures in the name of risen demons and ticking cripples who lay by the side of the road and fossilize, stain the tar and the cement like ink leaking out of a bad screen painting, off the roster and you will know not that once there used to be dusty creaky bicycles and bright pink slippers and red parrots with green beaks and upended lamp shades and natarajas and balcony with its bars far apart enough and legs small enough to slip through the gaps and doorsills you knew not to crawl into and knock you knees bloody and soft, bloated ear piercings and greed for colors and shame and shame and shame until you slip a hand down the cavern and you anticipate something, anything, but mostly a great old hand to pull you in but it never comes except you keep driving that open, begging fist in, clutching at empty air and you will not remember that once you scooped it all out with a big steel spoon that'd been sharpened round the edges from scraping the bottom of pots and laid it out in a feast big enough for a village and you watched the both of them eat and ask for seconds and you'd known that this was better that hunger is a two fanged legend once you carve your intestines out but then your teeth will ache and you will begin dreaming of Not emptiness that you will run out into the street with your shirt open and the harrowing chasm for something, anything but you won't know what to ask for. and no one will give it to you.