wasps & elephants

Black sweater, yellow shirt, black dress, grey tights--
I unwrap myself carefully to my skin, fold each thing
up on the chair at the end of my bed. My skin, my skin is
an elephant's skin, dark in the river where the mud slips off.
Crease after crease people and persuasions, pinecones and
pomegranates collect in my skin, buckle around my hips,
weevil into my shoulders, trickle golden off my mouth.
Cobras crawl in through the drains on this side of my world,
and on that they shiver in glass boxes. All around them, we
stand and stare with guns. In the dark I shiver from the residue;
under my covers I pluck at my wrists with fingers rich as caviar.
Crease after crease my elephant's skin fills with the lather of love
and the labour of wrongdoing, delicate steps in sandals of antimatter
and antimatter posed in delicate sandals on the steps-- it only
slides away when
I sleep.