i.

Peeling the hood off the bell
reveals a winking eye vivid-dead from
the squinting glimpse milk-blind and oozing
over wooden bones its viscid wreath
for a burial, creaking syncopations between
moans, from under its upholstered rind,
incised then upended like an orange’s
nude protruding head peeled, revealed globe

                    ii.

purpled by ignoble blood bloating thrusts
inside, pulsing jets against flesh humid
thirst presses, bleats beneath surface, fills
to insulate until burst, its wet
tune jacked, unsheathed, knifed, to life,
to kill, salameandering visceral marbled tears
turning intolerable, unstable, elemental, disentombing awful
ivoried mirrors polishing scars, icing over

                    iii.

wounds lewd views of the troubadour’s
minstrelling hand pulling hard The Tower,
tempting its fall, as though this
were tarot, terrible and his body
more cathedral than funereal, sacramental than
sacrificial, house of a heart within
a house of cards, its buckled
ribs buttressing a chorus of blurs

                    iv.

melting inward their pile of wrinkled
paper parts playing off shuffled prayers
the breath of which whispers what
structure muffles his trouble, seconding the
syllables of an unutterable echo until
all comes down, now in vows
broken under the weight of their
own sound, then, when found to

                    v.

really be underhand, compliments in a
time of plague tendril what calligraphies
a refrain, ‘No pain and no
pleasure and not wanting either,’ this
little death metamorphoses allegorical, metaphors our
humanness as tomorrow pours over us
its debt, borrowed moments are all
we have left to spend together,

                    vi.

no ever after to ever offer
an alternative ending to softening songs
pillowing against emptiness growing more cavernous,
abrasive silences grinding edges off this
memory we inhabit, jettisoned debris, its
only surfaces dissonant with diminishing repetitions
of sinister sonics the sounds of
which even our ears tremble to

                    vii.

acknowledge this many years distant since
that first kiss instigated its diasporic
gesture, two exiles Onanistic as fugitives
fisting without a future or an
illusion of a purpose this desire
owning instances of climaxes accomplished in
tandem, then discarded in panic burning
down to flickering contentment the scorch

                    viii.

of wanting scratches us with again,
and what, more than wanting to
be wanted, can contend with unnamed
agitation this passionate, unmentionable as the
sin we still are running from,
facing with contradiction nothing but our
reverberating destruction sent on, some unseen
punishment, to reinvent something beyond blame?