i.

Are we unzipping files or flies?
Bodies beg memory to compromise
with these eyes and not try too hard
to recall the first time I laid them on
you, spread wide my cheeks to plant deep
a wet smile on you before parting, each
surfacing panting but no, not
sighing, going out of my way to come
like lightning after getting in
there, lifting your weak spirit or dying
trying, lips denying your mind

          nothing, forked tongue crossing your road firing

a steeple to cinders, coursing
from top to bottom, burning this flesh’s
brittle church of its fold’s remnant
sanctity, ripping open my chest to
reach in and hold accountable
a crumpled heart for wanting to be held
by someone who would just throw it
out in the end, anyway, flames purging
innocence of its purity’s
purloined sanctuary, stealing time as
waiting does opportunity

          from those of us for whom love never waits,

knowing now the price to pay, that
no prince was ever on the way, robbing
this environment of its dawn’s
remaining sentiment, waking up wide-
eyed but alright, light whiting out
the waste blanking the slate, hitting the ground
running, unashamed, rubbing off
its Astroturf’s Technicolor, blurring
from dreams optimism’s opulent
fluorescent obscenities, burying
in ashes your world’s decadent

          images this burning fist of mine smokes,

blinds, iconoclasts, crushes, blows,
ritualizing ruin, crashing down
to raise up what I envision
working better instead, working hard like
a well-greased piston my filthy
imagination’s dark machinations
conspiring against faith to taste
what I once did once more, whether or not
you want it resurrected, tough
luck since I own what I perceive, these mouthed
perceptions are mine, treasured things

                    ii.

you cannot take, no, subjective little
trinkets I define, flavour with
my own interpretation, rewind, and
whenever I think of how it
went, I can make you waste in a thousand
new ways that seed of yours you should
have kept, planting in my throat words you might
someday regret hearing me make
money from, hesitating as I am
only facetiously in my
attempt to describe for you what about

          us moved me to tears of intense

pleasure and regret weathered before they
began to roll the way my eyes
do now whenever other men
come around and mention you, try
to figure this out, relentless as they
ask over and over what it
was like to be inside someone so much
more successful, so powerful,
to lay someone famous, if your name was
half the turn-on, worth half all the
trouble it got me into, if I’d get

          away saying it in the press

without your lawyers gagging me, if I
could possibly impress any-
one myself again having had you then,
having experienced, lived, and
survived to move on from, my undoing,
poison of my own choosing, you
who think in dollars, thrive on driving forth
rumours the froth of which you drink
in, thriving on depriving those you know
of getting to know you, you who
truth favours only insofar as it

          is not lying to write of how

you wrote off those few biographers might
call your heroes now that you no
longer need to be saved, no longer need
them, and how cruel when they send
messages which refuse to pretend, to
let you mix in your spin, when my
reminiscences waste this empty page
reworking a tale old as the
world itself, its moral not to trust, not
to reward, fools for using like
tools those of us who learn love the hard way.