Content Warning: illness, death

Mathew Yates – searching for a sacrifice to be

as sometimes as a sunset,

in an ancient kind of way,

i lay me out as offer –

clean as space & half as aware,

holding nothing over anything,

& bearing my guts & unbaptized

head, i beg, i beg

to breathe with you,

anointed by the fly in the ointment

as a priest of crawling things,

saint of stuck things, trapped

& unintact,

emperor of ants, i bear my view

of all of you framed on the back wall

of my brain, next to embedded

words like winter, pain, wonder, art,

like hell, hope, scar, sun, wing, wept,

dead, & crooked like the

dawn, i beg, i beg

to rise with you,

altared from the start, foaming

at the font of my gargling mouth,

i make geometry out of my self,

to come undone in angles