The bathroom faucet drips hurried footsteps,
carrying him back to dappled wood buried

in repeated dreams: a brushed ritual
circle hasty ringed by displaced logs, bark bit

by lichens; their sacrilege tools — hammer's
rotted-wood grip, nails with rusty shafts — littered

about a stump-altar where brothers met,
made not-so-secret sacrifice, to abash

their god; still suffering toad, random
picked to endure this mock passion play ending

on cross-tied twigs. Its yet resurrected
eyes stare at him, ask simple but damning "why?"

No Samaritan, good or bad, among
pretend Romans, ever stayed their hands to help.

where there’s foo
there’s fire
you bring the flame
i breathe your skin
and sing your name
my heart is broken
and  you’re to blame

Your words
lose their structure
of hard black on white deadness
and fly off the page
like arrows
piercing
with truth and intention
my target heart.

Its beautiful poison
quickly runs
through my veins
infecting me,
drugging my mind
with thoughts
not my own.

Whence did all that fury come?
From empty tomb or ****** womb?
Saint Joseph thought the world would melt
But liked the way his finger smelt.

Her body is not so white as
anemony petals nor so smooth—nor
so remote a thing. It is a field
of the wild carrot taking
the field by force; the grass
does not raise above it.
Here is no question of whiteness,
white as can be, with a purple mole
at the center of each flower.
Each flower is a hand’s span
of her whiteness. Wherever
his hand has lain there is
a tiny purple blemish. Each part
is a blossom under his touch
to which the fibres of her being
stem one by one, each to its end,
until the whole field is a
white desire, empty, a single stem,
a cluster, flower by flower,
a pious wish to whiteness gone over—
or nothing.