naporhymo #7

after "What Do Women Want" by Kim Addonizio:

What Do I Want

I want the original world.
I want it dirty and wet,
I want it too close. I want to sense it
before people paint it for me.
I want it hungry and cordless,
this world, with no one poised to preach
what’s meaningful. I want to tear off
the legs of beetles and chew them up
to discover I prefer the taste of red ants,
ants that crawled past my naked ass
and bit my tender nub. I’ll finger each one out,
eat them piecewise, head thorax abdomen,
mandibles tickling my sinus while legs tango by.
I want to tear off the scabs sealing me
to sniff iron filings and eyeball heart’s blood.
I want that first world raw.
I want it to defy
the puny claims of humans,
to make clear how small a role one person plays
in setting or binding what
she wants. As I find it, I’ll be that world
so fulsome. I’ll be bare and greedy,
inhale the whole tick and tock, through
my ear holes and my eye sockets,
and I’ll suck it like milk, like manna,
it’ll be the panhandling
murk I conceive in.