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.