Non-man, come shifted with your brambled mind,

thimbler of head-tops,

small rambling-man in self-orbit,

whizzer and fizzer,

new-man, craftsman, come and shift this.

Hatchet through a love-word like time.

Swing-crack its bones into splinters.

Swing-crack—people will crawl forth,

Cannily into your skin and squirm.

Rupture the breast of the sunbeam tomorrow.

Cultivate your snakes in its ruined stones,

who hiss. Rupture their milky scales

into tens into the eternal, rutting brook.

Caress your snakes, again and once more,

squeeze their black stool out,

onto the cracked alabaster wall.

My dear, you are magical and rotund—

a racer of steam, ruthless eraser

of man, merry creator, elapser

of the eclipse, sea-lip of the tide—

the relentless father of all which creeps.

Come, collapse the holy sound, woman,

and the belly of its becoming,

shattering them both into a hundred tones,

like grafts of flesh; future animals will spill out,

unkempt. This hatchet flutters in your hands.

Burn, burn through this love-word,

word. Word. Word.

Breathe at it; the ghosts sting at it.

This word Word is the water sung.

It is the Word, the nothing colored into the stars,

unspooled as it passes through the atmosphere.

This word Word is the snowdrift which soft hillsides

hiss at their end. You listen to its hiss

with your ears. You listen your hatchet

through this love-word, you, too, which is the next one,

the next Great Being prostrated before.

In that listening, pressed hot to the mount,

you will, O, Cortes constellated,

dancing still beneath constellations,

dancing in strong belief in them,

when it falls apart in your cupped right hand,

know then, compendiously, this word: erysipelas.