Inside where Jesus stirs up the heart and the purple tongue veins hum the same as currents that flow from electric chairs that bring on lock-jaw.
Inside where the devil sits in the dental chair of your eyesight and fires off torpedoes of curses and hexes upon every thing ya ever tried to covet… Inside where Jesus turns the coffee grinds into stomach acid and parts the seas of cancer in all disastrous directions, spread out unevenly… Sick in Spirit, touched between the eyes by the boney finger of an anorexic God and the sick spirit inside, stinking like a closet cluttered with molded winter clothing… black charms grow on the lungs, the memory scent of spring flowers are murdered by the time it reaches the heart… Inside of the body where the Holy Ghost has witnessed too much blood sport, too much skin on skin trade, too much the face of God hanging down over you from behind as you sit with your gaze fixed upon an empty plate where once eggs did shine…
Inside the eyes where the family vine shortens into less than a pin-prick and dies flat like still water.
No sign of ripple.
Inside where the smiles come and go without your permission.
Your tongue talking in a language you were never taught.
The breath at the back of your neck the bad breath of that anorexic and hateful God who broke his own son’s ghost on the vertical train-track, on a patch of hill carpeted in human skulls…. flesh for flesh for flesh in the blind touched eyes…
Names are words written in chalk upon the face of the dust…
What you want with a name?
What would ya even do with one?
The name of God is inside of us
Its name is
Cancer
Its name is
Cavity
its name is
Odor
Its name is
Diphtheria
The body is a house of plague
Its name is
Renal Failure
Its name is
Kyphosis
Inside where sickness stirs
you’ll find the boney
wet finger of christ
sinking the ship from the inside out
Its name is
Pneumonia
Its Spirit’s name is
mental illness
Look into our eyes and take
a bite.
The apple of our eyes
are haunted
to the
core.

foto/Shelby Lee Adams