Decay Never Came – David Kuhnlein

March 4, 2021

There’s a rotten socket inside my hull the hours never break
Listen as every cell pressurizes
Fluffed kernel of a torso giving births
To the hole that holds such warmth I’ve tied my paws

Spittle cascades, split ends of stamen moaning
The forest bends around honking birds
Beasts alphabetizing their antlers
Like moons cut in the door

The chatter of trees shapes the vine
Beneath which I masticate my suit
Sinking all sails, the wind recognizes itself
Where evolution balls between us, I open my muzzle and make room for tears

Geese squirt green between their web
Root bumped balsam hovers coloring, one only our cones can yolk
The globe’s fat, a ward of tiny piazzas
A pyramidal welt behind the mask

I’m tallying sprees, rubbing strangers on all fours
Walls of skeet unzip
Cottage cheese purpling the day
Abortion scent, stained glass slept against, transparent beehives

Herniated before I was biology, in decay that never came
The neighborhood melts away justly to its sewage
I bark under a black matte paved green by droppings
Their texture knots in me

There’s space to taste my mouth before it opens
Asphalt leashes pedestrians to an incisor’s undertow
Wiggling them into milk
I exhume harder, like saliva that stays put