Acolyte

By Miguel Murphy

I put on the mask.
The lover, comical
Masakatsu,
swinging the Seki

no Magoroku, asking,
Where is
the carotid, Kimitake?
Think of Gentileschi

in Judith Slaying
Holofernes (1620) hacking
her mentor’s neck,
that astonished rapist

Agostino Tassi.
So, the earth
in ultimate action is
a ritual

apothegm: Rise,
said Apuleius.
Suffer the rose . . .
One has to

choose to live.
Your biography. Try
to stare into it,
the liquid

you suckled from
a blue tube
to nurse into Mitsuko’s
mouth, your sister

in a coma
in a Keio hospital
quarantine, age 17.
The diagnosis: contaminated

well-water and lice.
Lice! Everything
meaningless is appetite—
My nightly regimen, facial

cream and Ambien.
Let’s top it off, I think, with pink
Atripla! How else resist
the puzzlement of being

one long sexual rehearsal
for a last meal
of boar’s meat and beer,
a plug of cotton

so they won’t find another
corpse in a mess
of self-awareness—
a bureaucracy;

what boredom. Reclining
on a leather chaise, I watch
you stab the fiction.
I’ll finish you

myself.
The light is peak.
The waves, pathological—
blood splashing out

of the decapitated eel
of your cut gut, Yukio
Mishima! The jet
splatters, until I’m a portrait—

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Miguel Murphy is most recently the author of Detainee, a collection of poetry. He lives in Southern California where he teaches at Santa Monica College