Adam’s Pants Fall

                         i.

W     e stopped valuing it before
     we could give a name
to it, realism’s reach is
the space between perspective and
perception, delight and unease, open
horror reveals its much-concealed mirror,
portraiture, confrontational gazes, and monumental
scale, poetry a skeleton key
to past attempts to reinvent,
tension between the fabricated and
the real is the same
of progress, resurrection men inscribing
the black obelisk, never let
your depth of feeling eclipse
your empathy, the absinthe-green glow
of the borealis in the
dull aluminum light of a
penitential Sunday mourning after love’s
loss, curator of my own
legacy, armless crosses granite and
ironstone to imprison a dead
god’s lingering ego, open a
vein and write with whatever
comes out, rhythmic and deliberate,
wandering lyricism throw-out your colour,
corn me in rose fluorescent
lisp, your filthy fingers molest
the edges of my existence,
insist on infesting my living
with your death’s presence, the
way invisibility knows everything yet

                         ii.

wastes so much opportunity, poisonous
as a deviant poet penning
a series of elegantly-written obscene
letters addressed to unmet neighbours,
I hide my intimacy to
deny you access to my
sympathy, to commit matrimony and
be sentenced to life for
it, something was revealing itself
when I should have been
revealing it, instead, grey flowers
winking in an ashen bloom,
the flight of the moth
indulging in petty appetites, looking
for god in myself so
I can become god to
someone else, we bit down
upon a laugh to self-inflict
a sacrifice, a magician is
always treated with suspicion, my
seventh attempt at rending the
veil of your body’s temple
and entering, butterflies fill your
tomb, jailers of something that
can’t be caged in the
coldest cellar of psychological trepidation,
screaming scripture through walls of
crashing water, gay men are
all sexual outlaws, when the
art is good, then the
statement is strong, wincing through

                         iii.

the afterburn, gods without dogma
open up their sarcophagus jaws,
a disbelief in the vulpine
deed of feeding on carrion
creeds, eating ideologies awakening in
darkness with a whimper, scrabbling
for light’s memory skimpering away
in diffuse dissolution, lust at
the expense of else but
itself, engulfing in touch through
a torrent of liquescent rasps,
pale brunet concerned for my
future wealth, scorn now those
joys you’ll never possess, forget
the excess of living a
lie of voluptuousness, your sighing
eyes continuing their slow incineration
sink in sizzling venom any
last-ditch attempt at an instance
of definition, tears run in
milky rivulets from his thick
lips, translucent liquid kisses, mouths
around bones of warm milk
provided my body an architectural
vocabulary, a premonition of recognition’s
wrecking itching in unseen mourning
jewellery, gripped by relentless grief’s
black veil, what I need
is more of your fluid,
pretty sure I could live
off your scent and seed.