i. Oil on Canvas

In the slippery bed of a slave,
     a writhing Nile of silver thread ripped,
     king-sized and monumental, dripping
     Egyptian cotton soaked bent with sweat
     three-and-a-half hours after we both

     desecrated it, spent Tobias
     teaches me forgiveness, his devout
     drought of faith a post-orgiastic
     sunset kissing my heretic flesh,
     his hands travel my desert-scorched chest

     to its oasis pool of dampness,
     fingering its pelt’s drenched path without
     shedding any of his hand’s Stoic
     indifference to indecency,
     in the arms and knotted limbs of this

     sinner, convinced my conviction can
     nourish the damning famine of his,
     Tobias touches my blushing face,
     whispering of other poets he
     had fucked, that not one of them had my

     talent or ever dared to do what
     he and I just did thrice, and under
     a mist of moonlight freed from its height’s
     pre-dawn imprisonment by our eyes’
     flirtation with a prism of heartbreak’s

                    ii. Under Analysis

flickering fluorescent tubing in
     its blank incandescence, I believe
     him, since inside a lie often hides
     transcendence defying for a life
     its revelation, in triumphant

     silence a single soul-defining
     moment waiting for an opening,
     a hole hungry for universal
     law to fill its mortal flaw, to seed
     a throbbing field all infidels play,

     saying that we can stop anytime
     we want, when waiting for an ideal
     is the impossible pill making
     loneliness so hard for men like us
     to swallow, what grows in solitude

     can only ever be harvested
     tomorrow, torched acres of mourning
     turning over in parched palms a loss
     of innocence that never comes, thoughts
     of him who sends back other ones called

     up whenever better lovers we
     want dissolve and fantasies themselves
     haunt this bed, searching for someone else
     when Tobias becomes more than what
     love limits: the truth lying in it.