after Zachary Schomburg

Lost between the seconds I said. I’m lost
between the second I said I’m lost
between the pendulum
swinging between your thighs. There
are twelve kinds of people
& we are none of them
because I’m lost between the seconds,
lost between submitting
to the hands of your unwinding clock.

1.

Start in darkness —
we are animals giving our bodies to one another.
Simple creatures never pausing in breath. A tongue there
left no room for future. The foot in throat,
a replayed film disappeared in the corner of your eyes.

This is our heaven that I’ve been chewing for years;
tell me does Exodus taste something like this?


II.

Commence in 7 days of making lands.
Creation formed blue blood on dry ground
& you repeated my name like you never had before.
Wild tooth snarls but no gnashing of teeth.
Ear filled howls of our own eradication,
other worlds couldn’t hold
under my step.

Promise me you’ll never promise you won’t leave.

Now forget that. Forget the
postulated attempts to what held
ourselves sinew to bone to a darkness felt.

If there was any other way, I’d meet you half,
hands full of cataclysmic delight.

You aren’t your own,
but neither I am.


III.

This time start infinite.
Complex figures found, formed haphazardly;
jolts of lightning & unholy moments of divine
interpretation. The body sings contours learned in
womb kept supernovas.

If this is escape, I’m perfectly drunk
& you’re blurry constellations.

All explosions end in destruction;
a variation, a line
that follows heaven to

where we weren’t really simple animals
after all.

stoop side you sit
fallen angels with broken knees,
40 ounce amber galaxies &
palms of prayer on an open mirror.

The benefactive is Columbian is
endless stairs on roofless buildings, is your
cracked knuckles of powdered meaning —
metallic shifts in the parking lot holy
begging thunder to threat everything
at once,

so then you can forget.

You prayed for all the wrong pronunciations
& when you sleep demons graffiti epistles
on the walls of your exposed chest.