She spilled lengthy prose,
      believing words would
bandage her inadequacies.

Enrapt,
   I tussled
loose threads
     of her rhetoric
in a feeble attempt at intimacy–

not realizing
   Andromeda would love anyone
     who had pried her free from the rock.

Millions of matchstick men
   brought their hot heads
     to an ocean of kerosene.

     Who's to say who sparked the inferno,

   when we all show scars
from standing over the flames?

You speak of salvation.

After the chaos I've caused,
  my redemptive acts

merely clear a few stones
  from the path of an avalanche.
   What sort of deity

would deign to
  sanctify me? Where is the sense
   in granting forgiveness
    when I still hold myself
      accountable?

She held her project aloft,
so assured of her supremacy
that she would challenge
God himself
were he an 8th grader.

Eyes averted,
I slyly slid my box
beneath the table-
absconding with my dignity
to aid in assailing some distant windmill...

She writhes
   as though her soul
were battened by bra-straps...
  
   The only sound
that ever
      mattered
was a
   breathy moan
beside her burning earlobe

while her eyelids
   squeezed tight enough
to envelop her.

An introduction of the eyes—
without a word
I knew her

and,

familiar enough with
myself, know
that will be sufficient.

A membrane of black ice
obscured
by a fog-bank
porcelain gaze,
he loves her with

Gein's focus—
gluing glamour on the ghastly.


Her urges
are a cleft lip-
reconstructed, not
repaired.


They make a lovely couple.