I am always lost in a desert. If there is sand or dust,
I am on my knees begging to start an honest life
 
with rain. In delirium, I kill a swordfish, use its silver
skin as a blindfold against the dust. I have never wanted
 
to see beauty or the blisters of a hero’s journey. I made
these mountains unmerciful – full of fire, venom, thorn.
 
How can you say god without garlic in your mouth?
What kind of god will let his name live in an abscessed throat?
 
In a lemon grove, there is enough fruit to start a new sky,
yellow globes littering their own light. I am holding hell
 
in my bowels and there is a map that shows how to get there:
go down, go down, go down. On the highway, women hail
 
cars and offer their suffering as pleasure. What alchemy,
what cherished recipes. I do not know an Aphrodite or Hestia
 
that wouldn’t give up her myth to be a scar on my thigh.
The men, they are busy scything the wheat’s hair and this is
 
the greatest hurt I let them know. Come to god, come through
the flat churchyard, the holy cave, the lava flow, the ruin.
 
Worship is a crypt where your body will last. This life is sulpher
and peasantry, a barren land that mirrors the mind. The Madonna
 
cries because god is a castle where no one stays. If you draw
trinacrias in the dirt, I will trust that you have hunger beyond your figs.
 
If you run towards me on three legs, I will dedicate an entire famine
to your loneliness, your centaurs, your radiant godless fate.