The most terrible thing about it is not that it breaks one’s heart—hearts are made to be broken—but that it turns one’s heart to stone.
—Wilde1
i. Octahedron / Air / East
Many seats but he sat next to me.
Every weekend seemed less endless
than we’d hoped it would be. Training to
ride the copper wave hedonists like
Patti Smith promised us, in her wake
how our hearts ached to taste what she sang.
Freedoms refrained from being seen, sang
instead melancholy things, kept awake
ii. Tetrahedron / Fire / South
two kids day jobs kept from living like
this was our dream. To keep silent me
from breaking those nights of quiet to
speak to him what might have been endless
had he any interest, endless
was my effort to be obscene, to
flatter with everything in me
another man would want to bleed. Sang
iii. Icosahedron / Water / West
in my hunger of my anguish like
to thirst was dangerous, for to wake
desire is to be devoured. To wake
us, how our breaths collided, blew like
nuts that bust in mouths, twinned songs that sang
chipmunk-cheeked of winds and flame, endless
changes after these chances. To me,
this was why we embraced, made it to
iv. Cube / Earth / North
seem okay, that, left unnamed, this game, to
anyone else, would go away. Me
I saw him dominate all endless
thoughts from which I fought so hard to wake.
Made it harder to shake when he sang
whispers of verses in my ear like
tastes we shared were music to bear like
burdens or grudges we feared. Life sang
v. Dodecahedron / Spirit / Everywhere
with bitterness we drank and still wake
to today, drunk since then on what to
play when memory sinks in. Endless
ways to avoid saying, ‘You want me
now, I’ve wanted you since then,’ to wake
in an old, Stoic friend what turns to
clay that stone heart of his crushing me.
__________
1Oscar Wilde, De Profundis: Preface by Richard Ellmann: Notes by Jason Tougaw, published at New York by The Modern Library in 2000; page 69.
Jono Borden 