I count the number of women you’ve slept with
by how much lint I can pick from your shirt. Girls who staged
a camisado: by evening, a washing machine’s dream –
supposed to be in slumber but you come out
needing cleaned. I love you the way a mother does
her son, even after he has said, “I hate you,” ninety times.
If I cannot remove you from them,
at least their particles stay unattached to you and
I am a bobby pin broken in half because it tried to open a lock
sewed closed with a special heart-glue; other
girls are newspaper articles read with coffee at dawn
you forget until the story’s repeated on a nightly broadcast.
God, you look like opal when you come home –
curly-cue dents on the back of your knees,
the kind of handwriting only made by fingernails or teeth.
I wonder if it is because no one can find your birthmarks but me
if a woman can be self-righteous enough to want
to inscribe her own, and so, you have just become a gem
littered all over with worthless pearls.
Invisible, I am invisible. I can want you, but it cannot be seen
how your love is intangible and cannot be felt.
What he sees is so important that he does not realize
just as much is too bright for his eyes –
when I believed our breath was a single, everlasting force
and why would choruses sing a staccato song
is the same question as, why would I continue to flirt with you
knowing that every day I crawl further outside our
three-year bubble into something more like
a bunker. I sweep the floors behind every midnight attack.

Wind whistling
Storm raging
Running through the night

Prowling through the dense grasses
Guns loaded
Cocked and ready to fire
In position
Awaiting the command to fire

A camisado
Bursting into the night
Bullets a cascade
Shells raining down
Crying out into vastness

When all is over and lost
Daylight ends
All turns back
To the time of chaos

Running and screaming
One is numb
Walking when all else havoc
Lost in the madness
Crawling across the ground
Into hiding
Then
Pounding of a skull
Over and over
Yet
There is no marks
Only pain

After the battle
After the war
The private battle scars
Salty rivers flow
Carving canyons
Which soon fade
Back to plains
Found and coaxed out
Wrapped in warmth
Fed comfort
Yet
Internally
It is rejected

Information
Flowing in
A holding of the hand
A little fragile
O the one
Trying to go down
Found and halted
Escaping
Captured and taken
Gone away

Time later
Still haunting
Flashbacks
Festering and consuming
Until nothing is left
But the vastness.

- Jay M
September 10th, 2019

In the dark of night
Creeping in the tall grass
Swaying in the breeze
Then, a canorous sound fills the air

Ensorcelled by the melody
A deterge of all worry
Overcome with tranquility
The dulcetity of the voice

Erubescent when I look at you
The eviturnity of words to say
Yet none would tell of the inexplicable emotion
I somehow contain
For you; it shall remain

You pull me in
Embracing me
I feel your heartbeat
And hear it
Echoing through your ribs

Take my hand
It'll be alright
You are stronger than you know

Taken aback by your manner
The way that you laugh
Makes me giddy
The way that you smile
Makes me blush
The way that you look at me
So affectionate and sheepish
Makes me ripple inside
With joy and happiness
Something I haven't felt in a long time

Yet somehow
I am still plagued by sorrow
Steadily festering beneath my skin
For years
Threatening to take hold
Yet when I'm with you
It's like a camisado
The demons suddenly attacked
The happiness you bring battling them
Capturing them
Keeping them at bay

Still
I feel it tearing me up
The blood of the demons
As you strike them
Is still blood
The demons
Though so cruel
Held me when I was alone...
They wiped away my tears...

Seeing them so
Makes my attachment to them grow
Then, when I go
I let them go
The happiness gone
Drained like the flip of a switch
That only goes off
Only on
By your hand

- Jay M
April 26th, 2019