I’m fraying at the edge of your canines
Attentive on March’s hairline.
There are beetles on the ceiling
They are roaming around searching for you
And they find nothing but each other
There's never any middle ground.
Winking behind your ear, tilting
Opening wide so I can taste the light
Inside your throat.
An appetite for rhetoric can hardly be quelled.
Salt-soft and sunbeams
Can the sea know your flesh like I?
Hammered to your nail bed I’m drowning
With every blink
And I’m always swimming in it,
The heat death of the universe.
In my mind you’re sun drying clothes in a meadow
You’re laughing and it drips over the ink like
Wet sunlight.
The more I know about you the less I can breathe.
The beetles, they never meet,
Teething, scuttling, catching in the plaster.
Dust in the air, a yellow film
Settles on your dictionary bones:
You word swallower.
I am speechless
You are speech. A dreamcatcher
Weaves your mind in magnolia cat’s cradle.
The alternate molar grazes on the inside of my psyche
As you play in the rightmost key
Almost inaudible until I press my ear into the hollow
Of your piano.
Where did the beetles come from?
It’s far too cold, the mulch of humanity.
They hang around here like breath under a microscope
Like you in my soul.