Such a classic mortal blunder to lay
my spine as it erodes, graceless, inelegant
on Galatea’s cold, ivory arms;
such delicate carvings can never be human, look human,
feel human under my lonesome bones.

I long to see you flinch and break
into fine, liquid, rain of dust blinding me,
covering the walls of this room
in a blameless shade of white: a new asylum ward
for my kind of insanity,
you say.
It envelopes like light around my awe
and my forlorn limbs,
tangled with Galatea’s unmoving ones.
I look for comfort within brittle carcasses
scraped of everything they could ever give.

The quiet persists eerily.
But here, Pygmalion’s gifts remain untainted:
the apex of auger shells, the beak of a songbird
the blunted ceriths, the rusty chisels
all impaling my spinal bones.
Yet the sculptor’s kisses, long erased,
the careful carvings, long defaced,
long reduced into a Grecian ruin.
I bury my body on your arms yet they find no rest
against the ghostly pleas of mammalian tusks.

How many for your fingers?
How many for your hair?


Tell me, Galatea, were you carved to bear the weight of
all the sea salt I swallowed as I drowned?
Soften under my meandering thoughts; I long
to see you flinch and break — like all the dead elephants —
any reminder that you yield pliantly to the voice
of the love goddess, that you were once turned human.
Break now, your solid arms, under my own collapse
over the sea foam caught on fire.

I am no longer bending and weeping to pick myself up.
Here it all goes down and ends:
my bones,
and yours,
burning,
snapping.
Nothing —
nothing less glorious will last after us.

— Fray Narte

Once again
I am captured
Struck by the rose,
enraptured by the thorn.

I see your reflection in
ivory paper,
and the crown of your sweet head
like a blanket of fallen snow.

Does it matter, I wonder,
if you were truly alive or truly living?
For in these pages I can see your image
as truly as if it were a branding in my head.

The gentle ***** of your shoulders,
the dark and twisted curls-
Now see, you begin to see her too-
the small & delicate hands,
with crooked ring fingers,
the intuitive eyes.

And perhaps if I call Aphrodite,
down from the sea foam
and have her fair lips kiss these words,
I can have you materialize in my breath
and echo into my arms,
a statue no more.

Or perhaps I will lie a fool
my thumbs and forefingers obscured by ink
and your skin that of clay
detached and resolute.

pink plush lips against my clavicle
breathe into me a life that i never knew
before you

We dance on the glass prisms
Below us burns the fire
The flick of a romance or love on the edge
A half open door...death or life?

I never understand the world
The reality where we live
It's like a crooked satire or a hallucination of walking bodies
Before they have erased all memories
Of their own faces.

But those who deny forgetting their own faces
And look at the mirror every day,
See age crawling through the naked bodies
A man and a woman in bed..then their warm skin at midnight on the brink of extinguished immortality.

Poetry comes to me in those moments
Of laughter, of a feeling after love making
An emptiness, a desolation yet hunger for everything
That is when beyond our dreams our shadow comes and dance
On the prisms.
Like Pygmalion, I create my own woman of beauty in silence.

she awakes.
her ballerina toes are poised, her nose is scrunched -
she is – what’s the word – alive.
her powder fingertips crease mechanically like a hydraulic press.
she has a beating chest with the calibration of cast iron.
her feet can climb Mount Olympus and higher.
she is limber.
she is – what’s the word – living.
her name is –
her skin has the swirl of a gleaming cantilever.
her head teeters.
she is speechless.
her lips are soft, her hands touch her face like it is a monument,
like she is a strawman.
is she a –
her spine has a curve, she can bend into geometric shapes, her arms are straight
but they encircle her.
galatea.
he whispers her name to her.
or maybe he names her.  
she can choose a name herself, maybe.
she is – what’s the word – a woman.
her hair can swim through the air, her curls have strands that brush her cheeks
and her cheeks can color in the blank space left behind
by words.
galatea, she whispers.
her tongue clambers in her mouth, for some purchase,
for some worthy noise.
she searches herself for a – what’s the word – idea.
you are mine, galatea, he says. i made you.
do not be afraid. i will bathe you, dress you, anoint you.
i will worship you, and i will save you.
he caresses her hand.
her palms are dry as sandpaper.
she is – what’s the word –
her eyes have the shutter frequency of a lens.
she bends.
she is awake.
she does not remember a before.
she does not remember a maker.
she hasn’t yet made any mistakes.
her name is galatea
but she is no longer milk-white.
he says, you are my wife.
she says, i am alive.
he says, i gave you life.
she says, yes, you are right.
you gave me life,
and i won’t return it
because you gave it,
because it’s mine.

She was a numinous beauty
of eclectic ideals,
body tall and slender,
skin pale and smooth.
She was……
My work of art
She was everything
a fool could want for
but She was hard
and unfeeling
her body marble cold
She was held
aloft, aloof
from this world
Her eyes vacuous,
vapid, and gray.
But I liked her that way
She was My perfect perfidy,
My big ******* to the gods
She made me a faithless man
as I lost sight of all but her

I have drank the philters of the oceans
inside the notches of your sculpted bust
chiseled to perfection by my minds notion
immortal beauty to never crumble to dust

Skin of ivory with curves carved by a god
my little ivory girl how my fire burns
breathless, stiff, and lifeless left me aw'd
a singular lonely lover forever yearns

Just one kiss to those stone cold lips
just one before I visit in my dreams
my lips upon yours, hands on hips
how you look while the moon beams

lighting your lovely void face
The lips how they grow so warm!
Your arms how they tightly embrace!
By the gods, a living art form
to forever love in this dark place

Lying waste the beauty of ancient sites
Where wisdom laments its ancient demise.
The human spirit had once taken flight
Out of dark mists and out of disguise.
Paradise found just beyond their reach.
Friendship feigned as in unwitting Troy.
Pygmalion's ideal crumbled within the breech
Pure knowledge strangled by treacherous ploy.
Yet wisdom still beckons beneath this frost
Rumblings felt faintly in purer souls.?
Vowed in blood to regain paradise lost . . .
Worlds sacrificed for one small foothold.
Beauty from ashes of ancient sites
In spirit in heart once again taking flight.