Ask, my child, I am a body of answers, pressing up through flesh like the heads of children, my form is covered in willow whips and those first tearing newborn cries. I will be your mother, take you into myself where you will choke on the vapors of my womb, strychnine and lily-of-the-valley, entombed you in the secret tower of my tapered torso, bedded in the velvet blood and pressed coffee of decomposing leaves, and I will birth you again screaming into the marsh, the green bubbling water and the wailing mallards. Ask and I will answer, mother and virgin, I will devour your sky and your stars. I can give you everything. In my world all the moons are black, and all the wheat is ruby-brazen, jugular and svelte. Will you have the strength to learn what I have to teach, to map this world in words that have no meaning but themselves, this solipsist vocabulary buried in cell and joint, gleaming arterial significance? Within you may find reason, ascension, revelation, in shabby closets and the wardrobes of thieves. In my world all the frogs are ascetics, blinking idiorrhythmic verses at the Pleiades. Will you understand them when they croak, when I do? Will you pluck from your own flesh each letter like an emerald spleen, extract from the body which is all things the lessons which you hear in this little desk of mayflies and elephant skin?

My child, my child, so much depends on your comprehension. Look into the clouds like water, the scrying bowls of witches, and see something beyond the sticks and swerves of your first tongue. Look deep and see mine below, the voices of snakes in their nests. Here is the gamma-self, where alphabets diverge and seek seas of rock salt and eel-flesh. So much depends and it is such a secret place, this. Violet and grey, this is the smoke of the passing microsecond, the place of choice, of east and west, and there is a gnarled path here if you can see it, covered in boils and the marks of plague, clothed in algae and lye soap. Oh, but my love, we must be careful not to be seduced into giving away the game. Touch me and choose, will it be calf or ganglia, chianti or gin in the glass of your perfect mouth? I contain the black entrails of infinite ideograms and in this place they scatter like migratory geese, nesting eternal in you and I and all, faster and faster around our precious dying sun. Give me a dress to wear, red or white, and we will go on and on, down the bleeding road littered with shattered grails and white knights with their last erections pointing northwards like sundials.