A grave is such a quiet place.
                    —Millay¹

                    i.

Words reminding you of the
purge you never worked, in
your stubbornness you never could,

as through veins in stones,
as though having gone cold
in an argument growing old,

frozen gold silvered bitter by
the lampblack of lungs where
no breath formed, where no

warmth ever would, thread discouraged
by its needling in between
moments which were seeming ones

of increasing confidence sinking feelings
of needing, still, even since
then, when our differences manifested

ambivalent, my own’s power can
turn to water what impediments
prevent your hurt from being

learned, from being reborn after
having been burned, what ink
does when my pen bloodlets

                    ii.

lots of weeping no one
else so statuesque can handle,
as if openness were dangerous

as holding a candle lit
at both ends in the
shadow of a magazine filled

to its edges with explosive
exclusives, oh yes, how I
know you have envied not

having this, cursed instead to
attempt to live whenever another
chamber in your heart fills

with dread the way crypts
overwhelm their coffers with coffins
of a gunman’s forgotten dead,

forgetting that, once left unsaid,
what you experience never vanishes
but calcifies into cancerous growths

of bone caging in beneath
formidable ribs the pain relived
in silence, captive to its

                    iii.

own internal audience no one
so concerned as you are
with being perceived as impenetrable

can forgive, your armour’s mirror
of your opponent’s endearing fearlessness
to love you, faults and

flaws and all, without pause
or apology, fogged up and
softened by relentlessly penetrating breath

when enamoured of a paramour
after an obsidian night spent
out together #poeting, pearling into

milk-velvet pools all our uninhibited
exertions and their sweat confessions,
no omissions, only emissions, driven

by an ambivalence toward all
criticism, until time comes to
get down to editing on

the morrow, twinned epitomes existing
in that liminal space where
people remember to forget things.

__________
¹Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Renascence”, Stanza 3, Line 14 (116 overall), from Renascence and Other Poems in Edna St. Vincent Millay: Poems, published at New York by Everyman’s Library/Alfred A. Knopf in 2010; page 17.