i can always tell when you're nervous.
by the way you drum your fingers
against the
nearest available surface
(usually my skin)
the way your shoulders tense up and
fold inwards,
turning to stone
and the way
you gnaw on your lower lip
and just a flash
of your canines show.

or maybe it was my lips you were biting
i can
never tell.

sometimes i pretend
that the scratchy feeling in my throat
is you,
trying to claw your way out;
and when that happens
i slip another lozenge into my mouth
and grin.

it's true
they did love you once.
feared you too, but
maybe that's the same thing,
gave you
roast pigs and animal pelts
and you didn't even have to ask.
a pretty good arrangement.

now
i'm the only one that sticks around
and even then only
when i'm bored.
i'm taunting and i'm cruel and you, love,
are not a great conversationalist
but
it evens out.

so i get to
take jabs at you
til you're frothing at the mouth,
like seafoam, briny
shaking valleys and hills with
your anger. and i can't help but laugh
at you. you,
with your dusty ruby eyes
(that lie now in a museum
somewhere
because the white men walked into your temples and plucked them right out -)
and your stone paws,
roughly hewn, mossy,
ugly.
we laugh and laugh
about what you lost
between galileo and darwin and euler,
so many years and the
backs of men.

yours is a vengeful god
too old for some benevolent dictating
even on good days,
beard scratchy like steel wool and
wishing it all went down
easier.
he's
raising hailstorms in
little-known third world nations
with each cold and
stubbed toe.
came home friday night hammered,
and with a whole new point of view,
he said:
"i don't wanna forgive you
not because it's hard
(it's not)
it's so **** easy it's
a cheap trick."
flicked the cig at the ashtray
and missed. he
stopped loving you just like that
on a day that smelled like gasoline,
while in the midwest the droughts went
on, and on,
decided that what he gives is
what he wants to take.

It took a long time standing still
and too many camera flashes
and too many 'do not touch' signs
to realise
that missing an arm has never really suited him.

who forgets to feed the ghosts?

the ones that
with not-quite-there fingers,
play tunes down our spines
a note on each vertebra
d major and,
encore.

the ones that covet
our pearly white bones
and our wire thin sinews
and settle themselves inside us,
pretending to feel
the stretching of fingers and toes
and each whisper of oxygen past our throats,
like the taste of early mornings
and hospitals.

the one that
cradles his cold fingers around my heart and
hopes to keep it for his own.
jealous and starving for
thousands, and thousands
of years.

this ghost, he
clings to my shoulder and
whispers in my ear,
asks,
who feeds the dying
but not the dead?