Poetry

Your Feet

published in Descant, dance special issue (147, 2010)

I have an issue with your feet. Your feet, your two bound servants, your two eternal cigarettes you snuff out on the stage with telegraphic stuttering, your feet, your feet, that you disown and bind to stumps, your feet that launch you into air and hold you hovering, drifting, fluttering, twisting, your feet, your feet, your feet feet feet feet arms are waving, hands sweep smoothly like gulls in glycerine, your nose your chin your washboard chest, your tits that are nothing but wood knots, your stomach like a soft-shelled crab, all pulling upwards, frightened upwards, lifting high and pushing, urging, all by force of repulsion and fear of your feet, your feet, your underlying unacknowledged candy-ribbon-wrapped stilts, two bunches of cracked firewood, cracked and dirty tar-stained bloodstained ribbon-tied glue-bound dripping lit torches burning with a fire that creeps up, up, up and up your legs, the pain, the flames, the hellish earth, the planet, curling smoke from frantic tapping to snuff out the agony, everything fleeing, reaching to stay up above it, and the more you snuff it the fiercer it burns and the bones, the salamander muscles, cinder nipples, chimney throat, white hot chin, straining nose, sparking cheekbones, boiling eyes, hair, arms, fingers flickering into the smoky ceiling, all are fire, all are the flame and nothing but the flame that peels and curls and furls and arcs to the lighting grid, a body of flame that only wants to escape from flame, the fire from the wood from the feet that shoots up your wicking legs and forgetting itself screams for heaven and cannot for even the length of a breath last away from the earth, but leaps and smokes and strives to lie in the blackening blue, and you flicker and burn like a moth with its wings on fire, and in all of this I can’t even see your feet. Take off those shoes, touch them to me, ignite me now.