Once I met a six-faced man who spoke
Of an ancient curse which lullabies  
And as we drank Suntory whiskey
He spoke of the hidden law of numbers
Which spiral and regress in a dance

Looking away from his lotus eyes
He continues to talk to me of the filth
Which overgrows in our greenhouse  
And how interminable poetry refuses
To yield to death’s, his, ambition

We drank to the thrashings of beauty
And to diminishing lilac which sleeps,
As he smoked his last cigarette he
quickly made valleys of early morning
making the sky a burnt orange-blue  

Realizing then I was wrong
To be holding on to distraught words
And trying to find answers within
The complexity of decision trees

Learning then that I didn’t live again
To be cursed by money or wishes made
That I didn’t live to be cursed by fame
Nor to be cursed by the respect of poets
That I didn’t live to be cursed by her love
Nor the curse of your inevitable arrival


As my memory of him fades

I hold my velvet tongue
and watch it flare
in a merry go round
it dies on hardening lips
I watch my decaying echo
flutter in rapture
and cascade molting air
and as I regress
into silence