A Visit to Miss Blackette’s

I held out my palms for a reading.
Miss Blackette looked at them closely,
running her index finger against their lines,
she said my hands are not in love with each other.
I brought what she had asked: a strand of lover’s hair
and a wrinkled picture kept in my wallet.
Miss Blackette held up the strand of lover’s hair
and a cottonmouth hissed its fangs at me,
slithering away, fading into a dark corner.
As she held the wrinkled picture into the light,
the ascent began. From the ceiling view
I saw what I looked like outside Miss Blackette’s room,
I saw myself in a mirror peeping through
my lover’s window, floating on a whirlwind:

My eyes were burning. Beads of sweat trapped in them, lighting splitting down the middle. My hands, that are not in love with each other, climbing really high. Perspiring. They climb to the top. To the opening of my eye. There, I see them in a one-sided room with walls covered in blood. My blood.

I see him walking jagged and long. Coming. Walking jagged and long. And she…She looks taller now and leaner as she stands against the door, staring at the mirrors where my eyes have been hung. There, pupils come alive. She stares back a cross-eyed faint blue. Letting him into our room. The capsized room. Suddenly slanted. The eyes that envy in enlightenment. Clothing taking turns. Crawling urgently. Slipping off their bodies.

The smothering smell of pussy gone foul lured the crows by my side. By my side, they begin to caw. By my side, they pick at the wooden floor. Ruffling their jet black feathers. Downstairs, in Miss Blackette’s room, her mocking bird’s laughter laughs at me. Her three legged dog, staring up at my ascent, barks Jackass louder. Wagging his tail casually. By now there’s a twangy guitar as her helper, a boy with dirty clothes and a delirious smile, sings in erratic chords:

Cuddled in torment
drowning in their own will
holding in the evening’s hours
I see them lying even
see them lying naked
weeping ruin as rain.

Miss Blackette didn’t have a remedy for my hands.
She didn’t tell me to take a bush bath.
As I gave her the twenty dollars, she said earnestly:
Your left eye will eventually become green my dear,
by the ease of seeing him coming,
walking through her door.
Made green by your stutter for words.
Tightly, warmly within.
Made green my dear,
when nothing of you grows in her.
His shadow will become your stroll. You’ll see.
As you take a step, into his footprints,
his fingerprints still settled in her skin.
Your right eye will be as yellow as superstition.