i.

Votive of your wounds by pored wax healed,
no lie of you fits anymore, not
the way your voice did the crevices
of these ears eager to hear dripped what

in my head, against its walls my skull
let inhabit it, this promise we’ll
call awful if impossible to
ever fulfill. Real, inadequate,

empty house at sunrise, greige ordeal,
colour used in a mythical way
waxes beneath iconographies
before which altered egos kneel. Lift

          spirits moving tides as night, unveiled,
          across flesh and stone does light ripped

                    ii.

from shores of bedsides. Between unsealed
lips a longing in prayer remembered
in stone lays there bared, apheresis
at world’s end answering with buttock-

spreading defiance Courbet’s abhorred
heteronormative origin,
with salve coagulating spent zeal.
Spilled as blood must, musked lust for love swapped

sops from loss dissolving glory peals
of detestables ring with close calls.
Into coils you stripped off thrice-freed wheels
fall, apart from gears my narrative

          shifts, exchange of regrets for this feels
          as if disavowed loss opens fists.