i.

My palms can’t hold the name of your god
blinded by the sun shield of a serpent’s eyes,

venomous angles viper lines, name
my lovers as Adam named the beasts—

cruelty of being false to one’s own heart,
knowing in secret the private suffering

                    *

for its public art—no, I don’t think
the world is so unkind, Winter is touching

glass, willing to take the bullets, to
position himself in the bee-stung

lineage, to task Atlas with detaching
from his grasp beaten clay, anticipating

                    *

betrayal the way world-weariness,
with its weight, confines in entwining embrace

angel and apostate, in this place
there are times when grief, no matter its

despairing need to be seen, to be expressed,
to be accepted as existing, remains

                    ii.

hidden, asking not too often where
am I drawn, where am I lead? graphite instead

in veins and bone where blood and marrow
once flowed, pencil in my breaking, point

from my pins of eyes wheeling on down to my
cracking toes, erasing the sum, wrong undone

                    *

says to me with sincerity not
authenticity, ‘Oh, you need to be fucked

over to fuck,’ so talk, drop it on
a Friday to get in on “The Hot

100,” to chart where your fortune parts, chalk
it up to the milk-frothing Bard, that lunar

                    *

Ruler of Fluids wooing through its
pores, into his crevice of the Moon, balloons

whose sinful flesh full of falling song,
scribbled and scrawled in smitten calls, on

scrolls of vellum he embroiders with wrinkles
cut foreskins let desire erase when aroused,

                    iii.

editors’ ignored wishes, prayers of
scorned petitioners whose own perpetual

impenitence he nurtures, bodies
censored he sutures together, lips

restoring parts writing by night what lyrics
no daylit eyelid lifts to allow to be

                    *

read or even ever said, those pricked
fantasies which, once sent, pierced his horizon’s

blackest, most obsidian, vastness
of oblivion abyss by the

drift of their helium its atmosphere then
inhaled, and now he tends to with attentive

                    *

care—this is the missive reflected
light returns—foiled with silver tips, glistening

dust misting breath, as an extinguished
cigarette does ashes left in lone

offering for no one to accept, explodes
into a kiss what neglect of me my Self rejects.