in the backroom bars of barcelona
broken bottles
blind old *******
with their blistered burdens
in their borrowed brilliance, basking
I sit; watch
reflect everything and nothing
a young boy brings jugs of water and ice
to our table
thinking on the bloodied realists
slumped in their stone thrones
condemning wild romance
with secret affairs
in the lost woods of aesthetic absolution
where ignorance has ascended bliss
up to the scorned eyes of thomas
that great protector of paradise

paradise
women and widows
and daughters and wives
sisters and sinners
slumped into sorrowful silence
stinging at the senses
where *** plagues the sacred
stolen sips from the chalice
wicked wine in the form of futility
reality and humanity
frail fruit forbidden from the fingernails
and the tongues and the tastes
and the tryst
between thinking and feeling
soldiers of thought
and solitude
march in their crooked lines
toward inevitable absolution
against the caressed canopies
of sensation
and surface level distraction