“We travel packed in the bodies of mummies / with all the coruscating splendour of a jewel / in the abyss, pissing away in hell’s ditches / eternities…”

“I’m tempted to use / as many exclamation points / as there are days / I’ve known and loved / you, but—heaven forbid— // I’ll keep the numerology / trinitarian …”

“Grief is the god of / long journeys, whose heat heaves, / breathes ashes onto flesh across / which tears bleed, leads you / through the garden you gave…”

“A tongue sent on a perilous errand ends / each kiss with a bite, exhausting // knots of irony unburnish the blurring unfurling of / future-proofed pearls, kings…”

“Wordlessly scored, stricken by unbiblical / chords, you follow me the / way catastrophe always follows prophecy, / enticed by the fragrance of / your own musk, hard to…”

“You’re the god we’ll remember / when religion ends, // dust on our tongues, the spire of / us rising under // the wet wrecking-ball’s touch, our / svelte erect…”

“Deft-defiant, dining in candle-light while / dying, adepts dance with your / doom out, crying, you can’t / erase the spoken word’s glamour, / our wedding bells were funeral…”

“Trauma as love’s lost subgenre, / irregular heart lines wind calligraphic / tracings around an ECG as / a signature my pain signs / in pixels of liquid crystal…”

“Angels dusting the fingered prince / erase my own name so / it can’t be sold, imprinted / with some counterfeit soul, engorged / going on knowing the hordes…”

“The headline read, / ‘Narcissus Dead, Drowned / in a Pool / of His Own / Tears,’ I said, / ‘Who really cares / how he went? / I’m not the / curator…”

“Beaten gold-intentioned, the hammer-hewn deal we strike / with loving wild things is knowing that / one day they won’t return. Promising depth, / love is a death…”

“Witnessing wishes vanishing, abandoning / vanity’s fulfillment, exiling to / an oft off-grid figment / of an Amazonian imagination, / redolent with fragrant neon / tickling perception in flickering / purple…”

“These are new / pornographies penned to / offend those gods / others threaten their / lovers to become. / Ask your Self: / are you Pro-Me / or here just / for…”

“Boot-leathered, musty, anonymity flourishes, neon-haloed, / glows viral, denies trust its / virus, Vitus-Dancing upon desire plaguing / minds with pulsating vibes of / thrusts fantasized, actualized by spitting…”

“Assassins and adulterers, / follow me through / exile to my / eclipse and return, // cloaked by the / heart on my / sleeve, the setting / autumn sun showers // in…”

“I can’t tell the difference or the truth, awake, / waiting to be remade, craving an urn-shaped man I / want to phœnix my Self against until…”

“Origin-story teller in the / kiln of my skin, / smouldering heat-on-istic, a song / followed into dark, am / I the colourization or / the restoration? 4K or / a…”

“To fall into a / plot-hole the size of / a grave, no need / to wait for an / ache to wink, to // interrogate the meaning of / sex…”

“Do you want // what I don’t / have, or what / I can’t give? / The grief is // built-in which, in / a sense, references / Catholicism, pain paid / for…”

“Life-spanning, but not life-explaining, I— / memory longer than my beard—had / to write, not why outgrown, / but how much so, now the / virtuoso, once an…”

“Best understood through my fires, / disasters which trigger the rhythms / of my instincts, excoriating and / excruciating, the wrought and the / ruined, reigning bruise-dark and blood-bright…”

“Cagey as two fools whose bruised dénouement / it is to be locked in a wound, / intractable conflict overflowing / with longing, walking into a // lawsuit nodding…”

“Echo was left empty in / payment for something not taken, / the way my throat loves // cancer, from the delicate toward / the analytic, pathetic the way…”

“Mouthfuls of you summoned, the whole / hum of him sweating into some / echoing song unhinged hymns want, / swallowing becomes necessary // to feed, indecencies become / deviantly…”

“De Civitate Angelorum: read it / as if everybody will understand / everything, and that makes them / understand, opening our doors to // unwed mothers, for them to…”

“You follow me the way / catastrophe always follows prophecy, carried / by the muscularity of water, / endearing toward erasure, relentless grimness / lingering like a theme in…”

“ A confession in wet cement, // written in whispered breath with / tidal force, softens mirrored shards / washing across windowless façades gawking / gossip, sponges away love at…”

“Grief is an art / composed of reappraisals, a / moment, a place, where / strangeness prevails and strangers / convene, whose escape absence / conveys, a pain made / greater…”

“All the whores are in their / finery tonight, immediately sacred in the / velvet cry of a throbbing brothel, / growing moans filling a glove, blown / loads…”

“Shut me up in a house of pearls, / blaze me easy as a star, // you’re too expensive and I’m too explosive, widower / away with window…”