love looks like
my face three chapters into romans,
musing that we'd both ****** a paul.
looks like falling in love with you falling in love --
i hope the next one is a boy.
looks like her tasteful lipstick, darker than mine.
looks like my tasteless pills.
looks like an empty linkedin.
looks like me finally saying
yeah, you were right, i do have daddy issues.  
what are you gonna do about it?
will you nod in understanding, as you did years ago;
or clam up, another god,
another parent,
undecided whether to save or punish
or turn entirely and run

I disbelieved at first,
Remembering your pianist fingers dragging through my hair. Remembering
My hand in yours, you turning it over, marveling at the smallness.
Yet in the truest corner of my thoughts
I knew my time was running out; you had said you loved her,
Somewhere unrecorded, hopefully.

So this death dirge soft shrill in my ears - this nagging unconsciousness,
This plodding inevitability, reached its crescendo and bellowed.
Discontent to pass quietly, it trumpeted like a drunken elephant,
The Third World clash of car horns and splitting concrete,
Constant and irredeemable.

Hughes swallowed Plath like a pike. No one
In your charade did such a thing, ever managed to
Consume the other. Still, it was a dance of
Damnation, spiraling around your loose definitions,
Waiting with bated breath for someone to fall into mediocrity. The
Slave can never rule the master. Remembering
You on your knees before her, begging for a sip of
Non-alcoholic beer - I wanted to ***** so badly,
From jealousy, from lust, from sheer disgust. I was a slave
Worshiping a slave. In that moment, we were finally near-equals. I hated us both.

It hurt. You dabbed distilled water
Onto the cuts you accidentally created, standing up to
Defend me from prying friends and awkward moments, but never
From yourself. Not that I needed to be. The ache from the unit of you
Was exquisite. I was so distracted by the burn -
So used to lying in cliched darkness, so refreshed to be slain daily by resurrection -
That I failed to hear the first drums of funeral march renew.

A dream you told me of:
Defusing a time-bomb embedded in the womb of your dead mother.
I don’t know if you were smart enough to flip the failsafe
Or if you indiscriminately yanked wires out, like your dangerous thoughts.

A dream I told you of:
at the midpoint of their parents’ anniversaries, by the ruins of every immortalized
kingdom, she is wearing her mother’s dress and he is too.
“father wanted to castrate or **** me,” he said, conversationally.
they have so much in common. they live the tragedy of armchair **** fantasies,
tend to ****** their own genitals when lost in thoughts of the obstruction of
their desires. (which, really, is pointless
because they don’t desire anything besides fondling their own genitals.)

Blinded Oedipus does not notice
Electra’s concealed ******* dagger. A thousand years between them, yet they’re still children conceived of
Mitigated **** and blood sacrifice for the sake of sailing, and
Defined by deficit from the beginning; her crippled mind sang
to his hollowed eyes. Kinslayers becoming kin,
Entranced by the illusions of the other but really
Loving only the unmistakable reflections of their own sins.

Ads for ski resorts in Parnassus
Use stock photos and puffery. Tragic
Greek heroes have been reincarnated as
Tragic drag lifts. Stony Dionysus, with his hilariously
Small *****, laid down one day and died of disbelief.

With him went epiphanies. With him went the Maenads
Who once tore their own sons apart with their bare hands
In the name of the shadow of their drunken god.
Gone is the time of performing sparagmos in the open
Or brutalizing the self-righteous prophesying.
We can’t abide gleeful brutality anymore, can’t hide
Our base instincts behind self-defense, can’t claim
We hallucinated our children were lions, that’s why we dismembered them.

It’ll be reborn. All sacred ground is, eventually,
Through the eternal unimagination of our collective
Unconsciousness. We never developed anything better
Than the cycle of, “Look, the evil Titans came and and ate permanence
Then the Deus ex Machina cut their stomachs up, saved and reassembled
Our ideas personified, so that at a later date they could be
Moulded into tourist traps and eaten again.”

Shall I compare thee to
somewhere I have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which I cannot touch because they are too
   like the night,
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
   Meet in
  red signals across your absent eyes
   that move like the sea near
  the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being
  without knowing how, or when, or from where.
(i who have died am alive again
the price we have to pay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.

I have loved flowers that fade,
   Within whose magic
will easily unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
   I have loved airs that die
   Before their charm is writ
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
  .
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:
   straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way
than this: where
  In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith,
  I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
                 With my lost saints - I
breathing from any -- lifted from the no
of all nothing -- human merely being
nothing but I told you so.

I love you more than I can say,
If I could tell you I would let you know.

Leaning into the afternoons I fling my sad nets
to that tender light
   Which Heaven to gaudy day denies.
   One shade the more, one ray the less
I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
   die like a breath
And wither as a bloom;
   Fear not a
mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is
unimaginable You

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes
         so long lives this and this gives life