you played me like a mandolin,
striking notes like broken glass
in the space between your wayward sheets.
your hands were my compass,
your eyes the Adriatic Sea-
and I plunged into the depths
like an albatross,
fawning over wide open spaces
and beautiful colors.

yes, you played me like a symphony,
my body ebbing and flowing
in ghastly syncopation.
notes like honeysuckle and lilac
coursing through my bloodstream-
capillaries to venules to veins to the vena cava
and straight on into my heart.

and you'd be ecstatic to know
that I haven't heard such a haunting refrain
since you went away.

I love you.
I love you like oxygen, like my lungs.
Pulmonary. Coronary.
And although it may make me dizzy,
I love you like my blood.
My veins, venules, arteries, arterioles.
Blood epidemic. Systemic.

Alabaster hands
I paint like I know you
but I am afraid
I paint like I know
the hours of holy songs he sung
when chip by chip
he broke his David
out of stone

but I mumble with a brush
polluted a tomb
with thievery and doubt
if I return to you
I will do so stollen
rolled up in bay and --
my Florence! I couldn't see you
I was lost

I could not be him
he unleashed, I hold
and now you wear his hands
like a beloved scar
and then you haunt my sleep
with your eyes of old

I am sessile, sterile - I doubt.
I cannot speak.
stone carved inadequate, for
I do not know hands
the venules and the etchings.
I could not learn

fiddling like a cricket
in the arms of leaf
I see him leap through ages
to come and observe
I am an artefact flaw
and him the sound perfectionist
he inspects fingers
as they stumble in paint
ever-looming, giant, bearded
with a broken nose

you, Florence! He steals
movement, instill it, gifts it
you wear it, then you watch me
with museum eyes
Good love,
I am no David
do not ask that of me, I may weep
stone in my hand
I sling stutter over my shoulder
and watch the forever tyrant grow

i sit and breathe
my capillaries & venules
scream-
seething and swelling
my heart becomes ensnared
torrents of adrenaline
drowning the roots
of this body, becoming
terrestrial
but i find quietude
again
in the experience of
i sit and breathe
the experience of my
body, existing