Vesuvius I

Vesuvius I!
Accelerator of heat and steam
conjuring visions
like volatile wisps of smoke
marrying neurons, making
the forehead dance
like a buttered walk, a shingled house
under tropical rain; my pain
is the under-earth river, the
stoppered spout turning its tide
around
to lick its original lips, grip
and shake shells boiling their
insides solid; and liquid heat-dreams
squeeze dark
across ruinous landscapes of pillow,
shadows lapped and layered like batter,
clawed
and caressed
like clay, profane
as heathen dancers
spinning the wrong way,

Or is it me? a wheel
or globe, a centrifugal
molten core, a gestalt top
of stars bounded by far-reaching black
and sweat-stained blankets.

I kick at quilts, leave
slug-trails face-down, licking
run-off
from my lips.
I'm a pressure cooker
on a vision-quest, pressing
hands against the rattle, ready
to burst reborn, fully formed
of phlegm
from my own head,
an expectorate god of wet and whooping wind,
and my sighs are saturated,
and I am thickened
by vicious soups of viscous sin,
cracking the nut I live within.