I purchase a book on violence. The guns in the glossy pages line up
in a pretty garden spree, deep with chambers.

It is actually a book about the body.
The moral is Open the Body like the Goose's, the one filled with golden eggs.

I hear the cracking of the blue shell of dawn
as I look from page to leaf to page. Thin like skins.

Nothing comes out of the paper. I sit and take shots and wait
and take more shots. Is it still a game if you're the only player?

This is actually a book about alchemy.
Lead hitting gold. Nests of metal bees.

I want to be alone long enough just enough
to feel the trigger of longing and the mistake of it.

This is its bookmark. We are one third asleep
at all times, guarding our chapter of amnion and wind.

Inner nudity turns into static.
Each riddle is a bullet. Each journey a ring around a mental pivot.

Each targeting our one ever-bleeding legend
wrapped up in all sorts of literal objects.

Something gold falls out of the hatched body.
Pick it up. Shatter it.

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I wrote this poem after I felt like killing someone for the first time. (I don't anymore. Things are cool). Is that too inappropriate? It became about something else altogether, but the impulse got the machine going.