Hard stomaching my insides
even before
these dull black undulations
of Guinness inside of me.

Sequestered in the echoes
of disembodied chatter,
the flagrant words
splutter to the floor;
whereas those same words were before
streamlined in marble aqueducts,
dispatched like love-songs to G-d;
meanwhile a door has opened.

I felt you take my temperature
in a fever-dream, I felt
even in dreams, your quart-clear hand
on a pale damp forehead;

The cold silver stethoscope
counting percussion in my chest,
with no whale-song nor rainfall,
no sound at all save for
the sirens and the foxbark.

Then after a while,
a night of mostly true silence
that left you with nothing to hear,
                 only the ****** functions:

Internal blood pulsations
rhythmically throbbing you find
some cells dying, others being born;
the anti-bodies of body,
the anti-thoughts of my mind.

She will make it better,
at least alleged to,
when, while her nocturnal
might she, with brown bandages
might have still acutely concealed
lips (now purple),
and the same eyes: Blue.
And I knew
that whenever the daylight lit,
didn't I slouch toward it
to be born?

Me, then, knowing no better,
to be warm,
and not yet cold,
not knowing of coldness
or anything at all,
any of it,
this 'this'.

When we shook off the mud,
and all in all in all, with
a wind westerly breaking
foreshadowing shatterings
of antarctic brass monkey *****.

Still some mutterings of mite,
practically blue and purple,
still some mutterings of 'might',
wherever first you felt a light go off
and slouched toward me,
with that stigmata your palm caught
in the crux of a rose-bush.

Wilting on a winter morning,
when foxholes sighed like
moon-creators that have
never know sunlight.

When all things thawed
and turned towards daylight
and shook away the frost;

Windblown brittle bird-nests quivering,
same wind that lashed your
goose-pimpled skin
beneath your raincoat,
your spine shivering,
beneath our blue creaked
lips twist two pairs
of gnashing white teeth
again,
This.