I will retaliate with his mouth,
and you will become what you have made
me.
-- you leave me to stagnate;
talking myself in and out of love, I
forget the curvature, and allure of your body,
and the parts of me that fit in it
starve.

-- call it neutrality, abandonment,
or an "inability to live within" yourself -
call it your serotonin's-seppuku, or
the fact you are inconsiderate;

call it out, like you did in your sleep: "I love
you;"
I do not.

He smiles with the graces of crumbling eyebrows,
with wit, megalithic in the cavern behind
his unformed eyes; i lowered mine, seeking
elsewhere—that here as i sleep, he is formed
from half memory.

The better part of me
remembers him in increments, steadily handed

our orchard, our healthy fruit. His arms overladen
with fibrous molten undulating movement,
a cacophonous cocoon for my madness’

half love. The truer part of me
remembers him as mountainous, thunderous,
a storm eating into the distances. arms
kneading throughout time, becoming. stone.

A mountain hemorrhages cliffs of
sunlight just outside my dark front door;
it is the fifth wonder of my universe,
a morning marvel
framed by coffee
and cigarette smoke; it is
love, with hair of lush pine needles,
and a chest like an arm of dirt:

in your too-old two old
river-bed shoes,
in your dry desert clothing,
why does the fog beat you
like an immovable heart?

How can something so old
be dying; is the sky an
unforgiving wrinkle

more canyon than harbor,
or ship without captain

are we all
all we are
at the end, or is there more?

We are elaborate animals made of wood
earth, flowing like water into the veins
of the sky.

The sun being a fist of lava, and the night
being an enticing molar—we are
a succession of tides, being swallowed
by successions of day; and how beautifully
we wilt in the presence of joy.

The moon may be nothing
but a luminous
stone

and to eat the poetry of it
is how one chokes
on love

but the romance of morning
is that if by midnight
you are alive, that is joy.