Malted Milks Too Thick For a Straw
“That’s how things worked back then. I was valueless, no?
It seems strange now, when everyone is so intent on having value. I flitted
in my stolen vintage clothes, topless. I was that writer named anonymous.”
“Maybe I resent you because
You don’t know what it’s
Like in the dark, because
Neither courage nor necessity
Ever led you there.”
“Have I built a house I do not want to live inside of?
Maybe the screws are loose because I have drilled and drilled
too many times, looking for something inside myself that is not there.”
i.
I can’t tell the difference or the truth, awake,
waiting to be remade, craving an urn-shaped man I
want to phœnix my Self against until we die
of thirst and both come, too, emerge purged of
our hues, blank-faced from the strength of our embrace,
raised anew to bruise through today ashen and hazed,
unperturbed we turned away from lack to turn into
decayed pain sweat painted abstract, lustrous acidity, with all
the anxiety of Pandora opening her inbox, to get
so close to someone that you no longer see
them, to grow into the scent of spent semen,
sent by men to care for them, those they
abandon the way a civilization in the days of
its decline denies climate’s change, decries conservation loud enough
to warp the floors of conservatories emptied of arts
funding, bereft of any audience, similar to that, this
wad of his an echo merely, an artifact, a
stolen memory, the way linden trees reek of the
same absent presence spent regretting, regressing, a planet or
a man, always on the way to going after
coming, gloating of growing only to show no signs
of ever slowing, always on the way out, as
tongues depress palates painted over by pouts, teeth a
frieze of frozen relief silence alone wagers its weight,
bar none, can decipher, I, for one, encode in
my desire a rape of the page, a tangle
of fire language embroiders into this paper’s fibres for
eyes to dart over and deny your flesh its
embedded fever, as its ink yet cools and settles
for fingers to transmute to pixels, you escape the
sonnet I’ve built for you, a tomb for two
weaklings needing fourteen lines to undo, under the cursive
wire blank and slant rhymes to find, to not
be defined by, and to chew through, ravenous as
the stolen fork’s bent tines to discover this poem’s
golden shovel, that is, unless it is no more
than a brothel of a riddle you unbed only
to be fed drivel impossible to comprehend daunting metaphors
mixed until dead, malted milks too thick for any
straw, delirious the appalling draw, penning to be read
a blister the colour of Sirius, the Dog Star,
Sopdet, formed on the back of my mind, let
your gaze fall over my face like a veil, a
ritual, this, the glazing of the grieving eye, tears
the size of incalculable regrets pool pearls, blemishing bottomless
crystal goblets with haze enough to best its glass,
irrepressible trespass, that every drop performs for prophets, collects
as alms to offer-up to gods of loss, whose
pity blindness covets, awash in emotion, this flowing over
floods your foresight, such that not knowing is what
you now covet, for the future is here, even
though you no longer want it, the future the
two of us transmuted to two dudes whose touch
never manifested love, whose union never was, for weeping
does away with substance, crushes, demolishes, annuls, this funeral
could have been an email, soaked in pheromones, when
the blood does not know to stop, I want
you to hold me the way water holds
its treasury of skipped stones, of thrown hopes, its
undertow of abandoned growth, its choke’s held breath, breathed out,
that is to say, to be embraced as though
we both know the foundational element of my sense
of home is found below notice, felt when held,
pulled back from the flow of the current moment’s
overwhelmed tiding in more than our drought can put
out, the way poets find each other via echo-location,
how love is the flower forever bent over breathless,
relentless, restless, giving names to Eve and Adam unviable
or enviable? this task my hell, in the dark
hive of my mourning’s murkiest archive, its night a
knife of no light slowly dividing my life, a
blade of nervousness, I divine my need it is
to immediately write, to cut this bullshit and pull
two knights, cups and swords, warriors drawn to fight.
