To be read forward then backward

we must stop to eat eventually
your black-eyed insistence

all soft claw and whittled affect
there is no evading the crooked snap of your
milded
childheart

my timely surrender to tendergutted suspicions
swallowed whole
the delta
like the sea
my chamomile ambition to drink you in

other saltbody
like the Pacific at the wind's breath of
my hunger at your hand

a funeral
the idle tongue leaves in the ashes
having proclaimed a grace to panic
there is a stillness never granted to the mild

if not indifferent in death
strewn prone on the road
pitiful
the animals
we drive like and across

the training palmed me as though designed
the shape of your snow cradle if only
I would love aloud in the throatglazed morning

biting me christened
toothcracking you call me
grit in your breakfast
the dust in my name and
a pretext for cannibalizing the devil
as
if
fanged, you call me

inverted clean through
you narrate, singsong birddevil,
of our griefs
at the red demise of the hour
you yawn
still
you have never swallowed anything whole

there dives the haunt of a tighter coil
when I arch my back
in the crevice that emerges
where dwells a prophecy
in the corner of my eye

press into the seat
it dies gently in the lift and
it squeals sharper on the downgrade

to the old ways
we die quickly

with a tea-steeped focus
I hear you over the death yelp

Now, in reverse