BITCH
The heaving & specific ache
belonging to what gives you pain
You didn’t ask,
but I’m telling you anyway.
black pot, black horizon,
deep illegibility
on the spotted fields.
You give me some water absent of fineness
that could never truly satiate
& i am the low mouth sucking on the back of
your ribs.
humbled by the late turn into
crystalline light. i walk with my back hunched over,
pretending i have somewhere i’d rather be,
pretending i’m not looking for you.
the eyes stare blankly, eat ice
in the glassy visibility of each shop window.
i blind myself reading for hours
searching in the dead-of-night hours,
all in the effort
to forget
a drop of sweat from your brow.
more lovely than a tear, somehow.
armies massed in present time
defend my right to breathe out
this fluent cupped dove. i close myself
in the kitchen sink to block out the constant
sexual bleating, madrigal scent.
lens constantly flickering on the skyline.
how about we call a truce? you give me back
my life, & i’ll double my image,
so you can have the memory, but
not me. crucially,
i’m already gone:
naked, making love among the dustbins & strays in dark city pits
of a sweet summer song
clarifying with poison berries
the skin you ruptured & terminated like fog,
amid the chaos & the smell, extenuating scream
scrying space
an inviolate diamond
so only my own insight may petrify, only i
ever mark this container again.
dawn peels off the roof
as i crawl away, a wight,
a freed spectacle, no-one’s
precious little bitch
wreathed with glittery trash
seeking some place where the dogs are quiet,
a future in which
i don’t yet have a name.
§
SEE-THROUGH
loving as a composite :
: all black elbows & ghosted mirror spires;
a syndicate of aggregated rumour, [rue]
hours empty bereft watching the fading light bleach the wall
perfect summer & perfect sorrow
in one dispatch
– longing & displacement.
cotton: taping up the holes of
what falls out from dailyness, breezy erasure
calculated to blind all instincts’ weather.
i’ll never stop idealizing the prospect
of you, so
it seems
can there ever be enough
time
to forgive you for being
someone other than your aura
said you were, to me
lasered amethysts
which don’t choke on
diamonds
part of getting over my lovers
or even failed crushes involves me
crushing on people who remind me of them
painful regret mixed w/ dangerous sweetness
until i release them
& the attraction is gone
but – there is no-one who compares to you, who is “alike”
i see you as singular
singularly unfit for me
& singular as in
alone,
a permanent state
you teach me only archetypally.
the experienced bachelors of this world
who spend 3 years cultivating a
potential fling then
sucking sugar off their fingers, toss it away
knowing
that: time is of the essence
spit pip erasure nanny boy blue
a toy haunting
self mimicking self mimicking other
mimicking who
i get more & less unafraid, i near it
the delicate centre of my self
fleshy oyster web
shatterable
if i am made of glass
shattering me will also cut you
cut a solemn fist in the dark
night unaware yes night
-ingales sing non-poets to their rest
meanwhile i chatter blankly on
shifting my pain around different
arenas of my corpo-skeletal make-up
withstand the bind
notwitholding
idealist power to be drained one day
loving an artist even a good one
is no substitution for your own art or
for loving yourself
& swallowing fear
& asking for what you really want
– wage war against suffocation
by false loves
whose stuttering haze
is no match for
your solid glow
*