i. Across the Street

Scatter your damage, you who walk crosses
middle-finger-up, sauntering among
passing saints, strutting down the track trodden
with the fallen’s marks, not-giving-a-fuck,
I’ve had the pleasure but never your pox,

                    betraying no sign

of love, a professional dressed like a
vandal, wearing bruises without scandal,

                    covered as you are

in lewdest and loudest luminescent
electro-lust, everyone witness
to your crime’s irreverence, none blind to
those fiends’ obedient gropes rubbing off
your diamond’s dust, too sharp to let them
touch your heart, edgy enough to ward off
decency’s warriors armed with paper

                    swords, praying at your

door, to repulse betrothal’s hopeful hordes
of naïve little suitors, I’ve had the
impetus but not the impulse, too hard

                    to get into your

core’s darkest part, beyond its walls, vapid,
vacant, and resplendent as you are, a

                    ii. Down the Road

                    rose whose thorns point out

your fading radiance, doe-eyed and fried,
rolling dope in your house the colour of

                    money, lashes like

whips fanning those bottomless pits, shiny
pennies lidded with copper your conquests
envy when they realize you’re the one
who’s gotten lucky, shut in tombs getting

                    to them when, buried

in your bed, they suffocate under the
weight of your baroque choking them with its
gilded vanity, lilies trampled by
your breath when your lips part to breathe into
prophecies what no deity ever
has, lies your depravity deprives of
beauty its use: consoling poets with

                    illusions moving

souls when they’ve been stolen by their Muse, your
purpose, perhaps, to remind me, next time
I’m divining my future, not to dwell
in the past where exes wait spread-eagled
to tell secrets, oracles my rising
star’s already eclipsed with its brightness.