Within a Sky Full of Earth

Let me turn these insanities into lines of poetry for you. When you first saw his dark shadow: your eyeballs unbridled, hoof-beats racketed in skull's canyon.
Let me use words to ravage the wild beast lurking on the shores of my streaming blood, then throw the lines at your feet. Witness their primordial ferocity.
Let me use my pen to impale onto paper primitive urges creeping behind your mountainous eyes. These papers spread toward you like a road. You leave behind an animal's scent when you run.
Let me sink my incisors into your collarbone.

Who can lift up this sticky sentence? These words throng. We all are scrawled by a river. Conviction shipwrecked and drifting;
stanzas sink, saturated with desperation. Madness motionless in shadows, winding around drowned legs, tangling any hope of the living. In voiceless combat, both sides suffer. Panting savagery through flaring nostrils, I provoke you.

I use poetry to plaster the world's splintered limbs. I scourge your face with my affliction. That filthy yellow water may overflow in your life, breaking against dikes and dams of reason, nourishing soil, nurturing crops and humans. We are mud or awns of wheat or grotesque cries of birds hauling delicate shackles. We always must write poetry, singing praises to the sun or another unfamiliar constellation. Let me disgrace you with derangement gushing consumptively from my throat.

Words order themselves before you. They surround my heart; blood coagulates under their constriction. At the center of that clot, in heat an animal roars. Do you see its radiance? Do you see those white birch trees, they lean on each other like my lines of verse, linked by grief, line by line. Like me, anxious, hearing butchered tree roots regenerating in my words; like that hand that signs my death sentence, scrawling on my hysteria's ashes: Love.
from Flames, by Xue Di