Lines Scrawled on the Feast
                                                            of Saint Valentine

                                        i.

Exes mark the spots where we lost our love
for and faith in each other, some sordid
     street of ill-fame or

another, a ghetto or a gutter
life’s cartographers never bother to
     number among light’s

pathways, dim-lit passages littered with
trash, filth darkness itself has to ask to
     find its way out of

after having dripped in, beyond return,
near enough to Hell’s floor to burn our soles
     to sores even when

memory takes a wrong turn and its loss
reminisces, among these corners in
     a pile of hope’s torched

pages, I paint with the brusque palate of
a tin-tongued iconoclassicist what
     tarnished tale our mouths’

infidelities both ravaged, my lips
servicing flickering images this
     thick spittle of ink

reimagines as gospel, hot shots of
my heart’s apocryphal pornography
     state-funded by that

same kingdom of love our lust bankrupted,
a depraved mock-heroic epic (fail)
     revealing all this

talk of god’s great work to be forgery,
no more an art to finding a partner
     than tearing apart

one another, so singing while I sweep
up pieces of us, I keep enough dust
     to weave echoes of

my infidel heart’s war-torn love for you,
martyred desires gunned-down while running down
     cratered and mortared

arteries, shadowed caresses cast in
the shape of a poem, I spin to tell
     you now what tale I

never could then, when I wanted you but
could not breathe, like a black-lunged charlatan
     on his knees, gasping

to ask for the hand of one of his own
visions and by my fantasies deceived,
     smoked and mirrored by

an insatiable need to be noticed,
and when you did, I spoke this in places
     no one listens, heads

filled with choruses captivating them
while giving it, without shame or a shit,
     gagging as I said:

                                        ii.

…Those olivaceous eyes wreathed with guilt, his
     lashes beat-off what’s left of spendthrift youth’s
     last innocence, profligate flakes of gold,
     amber sunsets showering hammers of
     tears shaped like question marks, hits that mist his
     lips as they pass, wetting my kiss, this bronze
          Adonis cast in

the shape of a poem, callipygous
     beyond beholding, unseen by a world
     to which his beauty remains unknown, my
     palms beg of him his blessing to bottom
     first before flipping, slipping between his
     jeans and his flesh, gripping them like fresh, halved
          peaches, I grasp both

globes of his voluptuous ass and I
     squeeze him, reading by touch the Braille of his
     past, seeing with fingertips each of those
     pricks that have traveled here, dimpled drifts of
     diaphanous wisps of wet, brunet fringe
     tickled to tall stalk, silk damp with the sweat
          of pounding’s prolonged

anticipation, and withdrawing a
     throbbing paw, I lick, cauterizing his
     distant, degenerate trysts with a balm
     of intentioned spit, articulating
     in quick, silent flicks my entreaty to
     enter his body, his own hands writing
          on me lightning-kissed

obscenities, defying my bright-eyed
     denial of that unspoken trust we
     both offer each other, writhing to wrap
     himself around me, as if enemies
     embracing the serpent and taking turns
     slaking the same sluice, can tame to truce what
          war-loads of come we

shoot, tasting in one movement all of life’s
     symphony, he proves Newton’s Zeroth Law,
     that sex exerts the greatest attraction,
     and it is not gravity’s call that makes
     the apple fall, but wanting to taste of
     forbidden fruit that fucks us all, making
          love fake its own pull…