existential dread

my mother weeps
hot angel-prayers at my door
so I may track them in the house
on wet nights.
my father sweats out his bones
under hot machinery, a trade purpose
at least twice the age
of the centuries he's worked.
my brother cleans amputations
from whispering surgical knives,
wipes them back into sterile gleam.

and I repress vast ecstasies
in cramped hiding closets,
trading memory for butterfly-thought,
reeking of drinking-sweat
and laying my veins out on the table
as pruned worms
while my shapeless brain wriggles its way
from the hell behind my eyes
to the hell at the back of my throat.