Tongues, lost in me   yours be the sharp and the vile   Glide neath my skin   storm through my nerves      I bury the nomad years   hours in the earth   couldn't exorcise these searing, pecking tongues   Immune you say   yet venom strikes in strangest guises   as the viper in our eyes   Tongue, throat, tongue   slayer of the word and stealer of wisdom      A monumental reign of terrors   throats slit up to stain the target   We're food for the hounds of trauma,   prey to the crows of stress      No power left to retrieve my stolen language   filtered through the illiterate fingers of death      Flies   let sickness be poured   from the cupped hands of bedlam      On account of their brightness   I made friends with the word and the moon   went with the tide and left for the sound   of dead instruments thrown out of tune      The red square patterns, dragonrise and   evenclaw   decoying from pandemonic symmetry      Let ring   a dissonant note in the music of the spheres   the streak of promise in the nuclear sky   These whipping black tongues   aching to lick me back to life   to inject their truths within me