Lament. For Neil Megson.

There is no shred left of Neil Megson anymore. Genesis P-Orridge, his artistic creation,

has taken over his body like  a pod person . . . maybe he killed Neil, and if Neil had it

all to do over again, he wouldn’t choose tocreate his eventual interloper. Maybe he still would.

No—he favors me. My frights. My wigs

and leggings. No—my shards and shades. My memes.

My mattresses. My squares of sleep. He wore me.

Night of teeth, of leopards. Dreams and half-

dreams. Half awake. Half human. Fund of teeth

and fronded eyes. Fund of fronted eyelets. Post-

and-beam. And eyehook. Hard hooked half-a-life. Skilled

unkilled suburban person. No—a mouth of teeth.

All gold. The transreformed. The panformation. Split

along the perineum. Half a fist. A half-fish. Fished

and spit.

               And split. If language hove a raft, it rifted.

Lifted hard. Sparred on sky. Drove October

through its post of pine. Until the mittens. No—

I miss him. Mittened. Muttered. Mutt

of little matter. Little mister. Sistered. Sorry.

Sinewed sad.

               No. That stops the pass, that syl-

lable. Labile. Then the pass is passed, and passes—

on. The mirrored no. Language hove.

A raft. I carried on. I clung. I listed. Same as all.

A gifted clang—a doorbell. Ping and chime.

A student buzzer. In the hall. Was everyone.

I ever saw. I ever.

               Graves and grafts and endings.

Buts and anys. Half a fever. Dread and very. Dead.

I would have. Made an either me. A careful set.

A scene. All past and post. All pine. All mittened. Dressed.

An open question. Open flesh. Unregulations. Heft

of dressings. Ungulations. Flesh worn well. Worn 

relative. Is what its garment kisses. Misses me.

Too well diminished.

               Underneath. The craft of tongues.

Grooved words. The continuity. The graft. The pureling

root. Rose-root, dark-root. Stone root. Tap

of absence. Simple draft. Then silence. Mesh

and measure. Hush—and hesitation. Hard on earth.

A genesis. A graduation. Grew in me. Became me.

Narcissioné

Driven—all this desperate green.

Headless (a man without a head).

An image in the window-sheen

(the left one). Another’s life instead.

I found this I who saw the bright

ash living in the ash above

the Shawsheen strip mall. Damaged light.

One breath. What’s he remember of

that time when—what? I loved? I learned?

I don’t know who that is. He’s here

in instances. He might return

and bring his solstice with him. Near

the lake that burned (the lovely one),

my house of sticks. No one who knows

me knows about that place. I’ve gone,

sometimes, mid-sentence. I’m so close

my face is faceless in that water.

Half in love. And half unwanted.

Jonathan Weinert has poems appearing or forthcoming in American Letters & Commentary, Pleiades, Third Coast, Notre Dame Review, Green Mountains Review, 32 Poems, and elsewhere. He received an MFA in Writing from Spalding University. A finalist for the 2006 Four Way Books Intro Prize, he recently completed a residency at Caldera Arts Center in Oregon.