i.

Fingers to your lips, skin of linen toweling
off sin, lifting the curse of shame like
a cloth, or ashes from the bowels of

an oven, yours is a name I do
not recall, recoiling and retching as trauma dovetails
with desire and claws at the softness of

false memories blanketing our corpses in false promises
we were once too smart to fall for,
calling deception art, overeducated and understimulated understudies of

dying stars undermined by fate and misplaced faith
in our staledated performance of Hamlet, overacting love,
lying together in layers of scorching earth before

we could ignore their warnings, we were already
the ghosts of our fathers, death’s mannequins wearing
an annihilated generation’s guilt like an oversized and

                    ii.

torn sweater we sweat under together, headless torsos
giving it away to horse-hung men when high-hope
hopes for nothing better and begins to doubt

its own utility, crashing down, dashing for the
door, shivering for a glimpse of anything behind
the veil of imagination, beyond the pale of

the physical, with swollen third legs kicking open
third eyes for our first shot at second
sight, foregoing lost love, forgetting about the unproven

phenomenon of “The One”, swine writhing with copious
mouthfuls of pilfered pearls, eyes undersea, tents of
oil framed in light, do you not know

me? Tears of moonlight sweating spoonfuls, my lies
polish with silver licks heads given over to
embellishment without so much as a doubtful look,

                    iii.

this is no heresy, my sighs fill books,
my lechery is legendary, the secret has no
need of being kept, it vanishes whenever we

wake from this and you, my friend, my
enemy, my spent energy washing from within every
man the same mystery, my wondrous spontaneously combusting

beauty unashamed to remain anonymous, cuter when furious,
ask me not to touch that part of
you my mouth opens up whenever it nears

your heart, this tongue a shovel too well-acquainted
with consequence to never again give a damn,
if I go down, then you will come

with me, we will be buried at once
in each other and together under the radar
whose mixed signals the ambiguity of “Us” spoils.