my bus draws in a shudder down the chine
of tarmac dusk; the heavens not quite mine,
sole slick of oil beneath a slant of bane.
we pass late souls, their windows’ chasmal wounds,
mongrels lie limp in lawns that no one prunes,
and gardens taint in hiding, piled in vain.
the mounds give way behind their sunken name,
worn to bone, yet stripped of earned acclaim,
they bend like oaths soon shattered by the dawn.
their bark was not quite mine, though flesh i’d come to know;
but woods are nonsense wrapped in autumn’s glow,
lone pyrrhic den that holds no lasting mourn.
my face bursts into shards without a frame,
my eyes and veins are ichor’s vile flame,
the fire not quite mine; it climbs a colder spire.
once saccharine and syrup tight as lace,
i kissed the charm, then drifted into space,
and yet rue looped itself around a wire.
she spoke in sore orts of scripture that night,
her verses saintly writhen out of the light,
wry sultry keen she wore beneath her skin.
she faded soon, as fever always goes;
i kept her spikes in jars, where sorrow grows,
bittersweet ire, not quite mine, burning in.
the driver hums beneath a simmering pall,
a woman knits her rosary’s funeral call,
the beads tightening a hoop around her breath.
a child bleeds cherry from a sinful shed,
blasphemy clings close, like blood to the head,
a carcass, not quite mine, trails close to death.
i glean spent hours from dusk’s malicious shrine,
seek vestiges where aching seasons twine,
and in their still, catch breathlessly, a rhyme.
what breaks behind remains in salt and brine,
all not quite mine, yet wholly mine, this time.
⏳
