i am attached to you
as is the rain
to the cobble stone clouds.

other people
make you so miserable,
but you've still got
yourself
to make you even more miserable.

i would
talk about performing
any sacrifice
if that could, as in my dreams,
convince you to want me.

agonising
over tiny details
of language:
the beauty of almost
infinite permutations,
up close,
makes for narrow breathing space
in a labyrinth
where you remain elusive.

for so much longer,
i will live with my disdain
for a world
in which i must be forgiven
for being young and un-empowered.

in the dim grey light
of a rainy afternoon
tires roll over wet road.
if i could stretch out the night
the world would still be lit
by the daybreak of your eyes.

i am—i fear my continued being;
solitude trapped like my reflection;
half self-made into a slave, enabling:
the other half to be coerced freely
like the pig in its dear muck wallowing,
my semblances calling themselves happy.

in person sober always concealing:
depression has been my master since
the first memory worth remembering.
and we laugh of how life is a cinch
amid vital eyes where every smile
is beautiful—unwelcome: struggle, bile.

we, in politics still non-existent
as the spectacle explodes on our backs,
our atomisation as consistent
as series, as the urgency that lacks,
as our enemy's secret attacks that
give us illusions to keep us content

and indignant and passive and apart:
before apocalypse, and our masters.
every superficial wound or scar:
a signifier of something deeper,
a structure probably still gushing blood;
a symptom of unequal heritage.

i am a slave severed from history,
from forgotten strength of my fore-mothers,
from ignored conquests of my fore-fathers,
from my foreign birth-place and mystery,
grown comfortable in my tailored chains
and ideologies without ideas.

i groan through narcotic smoke for vistas
clear as the love i know is in your heart,
for shared stories of logical revolts,
for redemption of past revolutions,
for real collapse of tyrannical abstractions,
for my masters to fear my continued being—

for passionate thought, to be subject with you,
our loyalty fused, our direction true.