Dying this Long (poem)

DYING THIS LONG

I want to take an astral kick to my head.

I will barter the sanction to steal,
with skill and cunning, because
I am crazy and relentless
like that.

and the night's dark faces
will hand over their sacks of
centigrades

through helium pumps
into expecting pyrex mouths and
esophagi and gullets.

that is why the crying is

empty. useless. still.

then,
off to Africa. I'll hide away as a runaway export
from America. sail off

into a quarantine because I am an import
nestled in the plumage of a sacred delicacy

for the hemoglobinous mouths
of a den of deleterious male cubs. delirious male cubs

can get away with it. all, at all times.

then Africa will sell me back

to America, but no one will know.
no one will want to know. so that they can
all go mad go mad
for me.

sweet. tough. chewy.
from being in the mouths of those African
male cubs. those hemoglobinous mouths baking
in the sun. wide, crude.

chewy. tough. sweet.
all the bitterness and vulnerability
and trituration still stalking a host

out by the spears that Africa planted
to air me out
in thin, lean strips, the heat did not
touch me, only stood outside my door

to seep in until it had melted all of
my eyes and noses and teeth. and now,
my veins are like the crying:

my blood soon will drip-drip
onto some unknown bald and waxen forehead
a cold and by-standing shoulder,
a big boy's old rubber boots.

but only you and I
will know what it truly is.

just you and I sucking in and
sucking out
our desensitized stomachs and our
dry as dry as dry as they can be taste buds.

I do not miss it.

but when the pannier is bare, unraveling
a tribal weave of collaboration that I have never known

I will return.

undead. except to you and all the others
who never knew what kept me

huffing and puffing and dying

this long.