Prayer in three betrayed voices

to my sons and other people that I abandoned

Across the quiet field my view embraces

like an infrared periscope left in a plain desert

under the mud              gray as the night

that I swallow while I survive in the ambush

there are masks, knives, sad voices that call me

from the center of a cracking earth –

I roll                 three balls covered with caramel, bloody balls

three heads dear to me that                  one day sighed on my lap

and it goes up              scab of lava goes up

from the bed of the swamp that lives in me

stones of suns              incandescent pitch

there it comes, like nausea:

it is the image of the picture of my face

acephalous skin, my face of unsightly

my flakes of broken salt

the blue portion of my gasp

transmitting, pulsating the meat of my mouth

and like rings, like handcuffs

the mirror where I raise black moons burns me

and reproduces the poison of my blood

the three stark heads speak out and accuse me

and they drink, they sip from my viscous fullness

my ephemeral beatitude of snores

and they reveal me as plum and false

absent like an abyss

dead before being killed by the darkness

and in the premature aging of my empty page.