☉

Three bodies align, tangled limbs
and sighs tracking me like a storm,
clouds of arms rolling in between
sheets and tides of last night’s foam-drenched
burns, jellyfish tentacles of
neon fingers diddling licks of
musk double-dipped from lust-plundered
ceremonial bowls, prowling

shallow shores, I know one of us
must have plowed hard into Christ’s wounds
a new hole, since the scent I sense
is a fragrance anything but
penitential, though a perfume
no less reverent and sacra-
mental, tingling moments, remnants
of a sensual journey no

sentiment can be trusted to
remember properly, ashes
of choking coals the only trace
of evidence left attesting
to our ceremony, shadows
covering faces, a clustered
trinity of crumpled hosts, we
urchins turned leviathans, whose

entwined constellations are still
inflamed and engorged from having
served ravenous purposes as
torsos re-purposed, twisted by
fire’s raven-clawed extravagance,
by furnaces of loins, into
an unkindness of eucharists,
those weekend enthusiasts of

                    ☽

promiscuity lamenting
spilled wine, tasting too soon youth’s end,
chastened after libations, bruised
and weakened from having been used
and serviced, thighs and minds both soaked
after pulled wide open, a tide
flooding us, a massacre of
mollusks left unclean by chem-trails

of obscene toxic breath piercing
exotic flesh from above to
below, death as if heaven-sent,
desire extinguishing life’s light
head-to-toe, inconsolable
and uncontrollable breaths, like
beasts feasting on erogenous
zones, fangs biting my ribs with warm

kisses gnawing sobering slits
letting morning in, daylight’s haste
wasting no time making of three
kids its breakfast: two heartbroken
men—one a poet—and a scorned
woman, all lovelorn strangers to
one another unknown, running
from answers to questions not yet

asked, going nowhere unless pain’s
test passes, languishing outside
society together in
abandoned caravanserai
lonelier than them, with ghosts and
memory’s dust taking shelter,
liars performing trust’s more than
seven wonders over & over

                    ☿

in a four-poster bed restless
as the world’s fringes, working its
edges, getting to know closely
its limits, playing martyrs to
no audience but our vices,
we stick to each other’s armour
like magnets, like marmalade to
the grinning corners of famished

lips, crushed apricots melting in
to whispers, hushed wisdom leaking,
skin and sweat doing to us what
thirst does to lovers, what trying
to hide from sin does to leather,
emancipated victims of
inhibition wearing it in,
nothing left to strip, friends taking

a stand—while lying down, knocking
boots—against Fascism, we wake to
shake again from its oppressive
opposition, enough rage to
stitch into passion what makes our
secret existence less unbear-
able, our “alternative life-
styles” less undesirable, and

the nudity of truth much more
fashionable—through a needle’s
eye tears thread a silk trail which, to
my relief, weaves a sign I should
surrender doubt and believe that
following close its road leads to
one of those treasures far better
than pleasure spent in exile’s arms.