When I write a poem,
it is for you

Even if it does not
begin with love

You were to me what
Patroclus was to Achilles

What Aphrodite
was to Sappho

If I knew that one day
I will be apart from you,
I would have quietly chosen death

I never learn, I never learn
Keep mourning your ashes in the golden urn
You were the dawning sun opened wide
A purity I slaughtered for the god inside

I never fade, vague as fog, I never fade
Into the scarlet waters, I wade
Dusk weeps and deserted I wait
Wait, I wait, O timeless Patroclus, I wait

A thousand ships, all united, set sail
To free their heavenly queen and her veil
A thousand ships I could’ve let burn
Into the wretched battle had you not run

Rambles, rambles on this silent sea
Your extinguished heart will hear not a plea
You took all the humans in me along
This bleak divinity, worth not a single song

Never not do I hope, never not
I hope, I hope, in this despaired hope I rot
You lurk a painful past in my unseeing gaze
As rows upon rows of men I raze

In the halls of living, I search for your name
Your love-licked body I surrendered to my flame
I hear your starlit lips yell at me to stay
Achilles, Achilles, live, you ****** sun, they say

All my charismatic promises I forget
This wish, sweet moon, you shall not get
I tear then my heart in search of you
A river red as doom, and a stillness blue

I am here, Patroclus, now spare me this lone
My frenzied ghost screams soundless on
Our ashes kiss and kiss in the golden urn
I never learn, alas, I never learn

Oh, Achilles, Achilles,
How they sing of your anger.
The merciless, unforgiving anger
Of which you felt at the loss of your Patroclus.
Why is there no melody of your melancholy?
The crushing weight, heavy on your chest,
The undesirable yearning to continue this life
Without your better half.
Oh, Achilles, Achilles,
Will you sing to me
About your agony?

Will you sing to me of how you sent
The one you adored the most
Into battle, baring your armor?
Oh, Achilles, Achilles,
Will you sing of how it made him
Into someone he did not know?

And as he went to you in a dream
And told you his last desire,
Did you know?
Oh, Achilles,
How he loved you.

body like a Hoplite,
raised from the dust to lay the land-
sent armed
ashen spear and heart,
trunks of armour clad legs
growing into the clay coloured Earth
rooted.

these lyre-heartstrings taut with longing.
to see
a browbeaten Myrmidon,
in daylight.

watch, as the breath of Zeus escapes
Grecian chests,
concave with muscle
Olympus itself exists within those crevices.

i lay offerings,
ambrosia soaked spoken word
at the under-flesh of your calf
laying beside myself
in hope the whispers bestowed to you from the Fates
on the eve of Troy
mean less with your lips, pressed to wine, against mine.

He fought for honor with Achilles
Two brothers in arms against the world of treachery and deceit
No one saw the tender gazes that the two shared in their last goodbye
A final brush of their hands as they shake with an uncertain future
Patroclus knew he would die
Dressed in his lovers armour
At the hands of his lovers enemy
And in his death he'd bare his heart with one final grand gesture
He'd gladly exchange his life
For his beloved Achilles

i understand the Greeks
When they wrote of boys
turning to men as
“in the flush of their strength”.
as if the tides of youth,
had burst it’s banks
flooding childhood, like the Mycenae
against Troy.