Rewriting Leviticus

I’m obsessed with the trade of
beautiful people and especially wives or slaves
or prostitutes who were at times the most
educated, independent, but those were just
exceptions, weren’t they, unlike the men who
wore their perfumed skins like softest leather
and then smothered them under their
mass delusions of hysteric femurs screaming
about a revolution to come and rip
their penises straight from their bodies,

and I think; whales have a language
we don’t understand, there’s never been
a system of government that doesn’t become
Feudalism in practice. I prayed to a god 3 times a day
just because someone told me to and once
I dreamt I was in an endless shopping complex
wandering through the twisting food court
lit by hexagonal fluorescent bulbs hanging
from twisted wreaths of lavender ivy with nothing
but a backpack full of water dripping behind me
which people slipped and died in--

--Decided on mediterranean and entered a store
much bigger within and sat at the bar and ordered
nothing because there were three menus and none
said anything about food, just notes written
by and about the owner who also owned a
publishing company and dabbled in
noir writing, mostly about heroines with long
black hair like his first love and sister
who were only not the same person by
coincidence of birth and sexual orientation--

I woke up in a different place and for
a moment forgot what was real and sometimes
question the benefit of imaginary knowledge like
why am I never happy? Why doesn’t anything
even try to make sense? Is this just a joke
or at least a story? Am I writer or just the prophet?
Has the man ever spoken or is it just
a fever dream from a nebulous adolescent
demigod who hates to call himself
anything but a coward with ten fingers?

--And finally there is a man at the counter
who calls himself Mirsad but isn’t and of course
he tries to kiss me with his tongue, a dead pig
full of maggots and botflies like alien abortions
protruding from his face when he pulls back to look me
in the eyes and ask me if I ever read his poetry,
if I will please read exactly what he wanted me
to keep hearing over and over in this sudden
void twisting into nothing but the color of a feeling
sinking between us, sloughing off with his
putrified teeth and nails, the smell of it so sweet
I want to peel him into my own bed--

Are you anything but a monkey with
tremulous schizoid vibrations wringing constantly
in your skull? Are you anything but
what you imagined? Are you anything
but a single figment in a novel you're writing
that refuses to end? Are you anything but
a man who never lived besides in a solipsist
dimensional fold in that bathroom
where the tub overflowed?

--Mirsad looks down at me from the rafter
and I hold his skin which turns to silk, turns to wine,
turns to water.