The dark engorged with brilliance skews the loop. I always squint when I sleep. A guttural hum suspends the night's dome, a turbine rotating on an axis presumed from the sun's abdomen as it shudders overwhelmed with stars and planets, the undefined fractals of the cosmic iris, risen, multiplying, lustrous. Like a whispered marionette, you hang by sinews laconically from my optic chasm, a reservoir of muted incantations cut open to run splinters through your nape with rough hands scraping at gauze used to cover the scars no daddy could wash clean. You were soft-selected, made animate and coated with milkglass and hardening pearl.
Daddy is a wax figure, the ideal on the viewscreen.
You snake in his lap like a belly but with more precision. He turns your aspiring words over in their graves, you with the wandering eyes and lips, the ones that startle me in bondage through the blinds before dawn. I'm starting toward the window in gasps and, looking down, I see the street full of light already caking on asphalt. I prefer the dark walls of a jazz club where your father lives at the bar entertaining his own drool as we exchange knives and flutes. Fits of ribbon close in on us nightly, his chalk shell tied overhead to the frame of a vandalized portrait of you made from baby sparrows' tongues and crewel.