I wouldn’t be high for a couple years
cutting your chin through our chatter, I remember
the churning of yearning,
an abrasive fear
forgetting every tooth in our smiles.
November, our supple glands exposed
we were four ships
brushing quietly in the bastions;
so you poured kerosene over our toes

and taught poised and cackling tongues
until we never slept a wink
without the sigh of something greater
Here, tear apart these things
pay no credence to their creators
so everything
was the truth
with your fist its righteous order
as you pulled us from the garden
and you taught us of the Lord—
oh, how these blisters ache in light
how they clog up all the pores,
now that every ship drawn to our eyes
drifts unrecognized
on to shore.

The Panther scales above the infirmity of the jungle
like a reverent vicar, in her mouth
she clutches an infant. To some this is
the most intoxicating world—so long as you don’t mind
a little ruse, how could there be a day in your whole life
that doesn’t consist of a flurry of happiness?
Below, game lopes abundantly as the ocean tributaries,
each frolicking along a distinctive course, not that
she ever really ruminates over them, or anything else.
The panther has never had to digest a fable,
though her existence propagates an analogous terror.
When predators raid her hearth, they remain
ephemeral, irrelevant – her insatiable hunger the only story
she has ever managed to revisit.
Your skin will never feel her eyes. I cannot say
she is wrong. Piously she prepares her supper,
with its meager, undeveloped vigor, erupting
a contented roar in the conversion of its properties.
She exists the product of her kind, the natural order her excuse
as she scales back above the inconsequence of the jungle
again, to do the same thing
(as I’d longed to do something, anything) perfectly.

Asphalt hot will scald the toe
The smallest step will stub it,
Succulent pots will catch the eye—
Surely to leave you rubbing.

And Fear, the wretched, ***** cat,
A mane sheer black with pause
Shimmies down the fire escape
Like good old Sandy Claws.

Blind as night these twenty years
With memory for an action.
Fear, that ***** is blind as me,
But she seems to find her satisfaction.

The difference between stepping
Stones and stumbling is the lesson;
You turned the light on, a quarter to three,
And from my blindness, drew a crescent.

Asphalt hot could scald the toe
Could melt holes in shoes, you know.
But nothing ever burns quite like
Denying your weary feet that road.

And Fear, the wretched, hoarding cat,
A mane sheer black and sane:
You ought to thank her for the ride
Once you’ve felt, at last, the pouring rain.

I feel your eyes under my skin
Coursing, they dart up my arteries
And breathe in the vessels
Three days still after the mark.
Full blue moons on the horizon, I
Drink elixirs to see their tidal
Wave ripples again in the dark.
It remains an inconvenient truth,
Carefully lain glaciers melting to
Erode the stability of mountains.
The intricacies of habitats drowned
By the Holy Spirit, a reflection of the
Sun. The heavens still would be nothing
Without the spirit of two blue moons.
I know the planets well, those caught
By your orbit at the dawn of ages and
Still, I could have held you better.

That I always saw you in a white studio apartment
In the big city with its slanted houses surrounded
By the crooked, recycled fences;
That walls as big as mirrors can make your shivering
Thighs come off like sophisticated weaponry, or
That I had been on drugs when I begged you.

Did you know that the square root of any number
Is less real than what we saw on the television, or
That I believed in numbers and you taught me
Where the alphabets could never agree upon anything, or

That I’m not writing this for you. I can assure that you are
Dead and gone, the way hearing Snow Patrol for the first time
Can never be revisited.

Did you know that my drapes still moved like your body
Danced ruefully beneath them, like a ghost in the machine
Or a ghost machine, or a breeze, perhaps a spot of indigestion.
Did you know that I could never let that specter go, or
That I have now.