Personality State: Scavenger’s Daughter

I want to look prim if not proper, twist modestly
if not sedate. I want to give fate a reason
to hate me and exhaust me and lick me up.
I want my taste on the lips. I want to give shivers
living like lovers, and prayers when I cannot.

I want to break the way the branch predicts.
Break the veins, a village. Break the outer outside
first. Break the wear to market. Break
the hand with work. Break the gesture. Break
its jerk. Break to know the goldrush want.

Multiply the world by its wreckage, and come out
ahead, hearing dawn as it barks from the holds
of ships, landing quick like music with its crack
of whips, from the holds of a game I cannot
watch. I want to sin at the eaves of heaven.

One eye to the nowhere periscope of sleep.
A stiff gene that fits, an X where I have been.
The many bicycles of memory and their many
broken chains. I want hours to happen,
beehive-rich, and leave the watchman lame.

I want my God with no religion. I want to want
the tangled larceny of thirst. I want my heart
to have such branches its Octobers dream.
Little brevity, little jealousy of larks.
Flock of road, wind forbidden, excellence of coast.