Nobody’s coming, no body
can feel me summon from within
its bleeding partition always
running up, never down, this skin
shedding off, and often, all my
caution all my lovers drown in
when it’s not ease, but reluctance,
driving them to push my buttons.
From out a novella only
other authors know, translation
moves relics from a new city
to an obscured, forgotten one
where I wander cold streets, brusquely
calling out of the winter’s wind,
prime movers my driver crashes
into as I writhe through lyrics.
And, while rifling through patchwork sheets
of icy street-people hanging
out and ripping off misers, each
walking the boulevard, wearing
blank faces better than any
unprimed canvas could languish in,
I find him; his hands powerless
against my fistfuls of kisses.
Beating his face, I make up eyes
out of my breath and draw them on
my mannequin with my tongue he
says feels like quicksilver poured on
dawn’s scorching, panoramic heat;
coursing its licking marathon
across him in sentences
resurrecting dead languages.
Latin and willing, he’s only
doing this, and here, with these men
because, ‘it’s exploration, we
all do it when we’re young,’ and then
we discover in our journey
he’s never found love, not even
in the pool that drowned Narcissus,
making fools of their own wishes.