Portrait I

There are stars in her eyes.
Not tears, stars. White hot
Gas fires burning cleanly
In her skull. She is in love
With the world, with herself,
With anything that’s got flesh
Wrapped around it, or eyes
To see those stars burning.

She wants a witness,
Or a twin flame. Someone
To help her tend that fire.
Someone for whom
she could do the same,
Someone to build a pyre
And lay her body down;
To burn her away, and leave
Only those bloodless lights.

Love Songs.

We sang those sweet songs
with our tongues lolling out
rolling over and about
the substance of each phrase.
Between the sheets, it’s so easy
to say. It’s only semantics.
Premature ejaculations
of the syllabic sort.
Simple words with their
Promises unkept.

Words.

Your mouth hung wide, jaw swung,
gently, a cradle for your tongue
and teeth. So many syllables
crowded in behind them.
Oh, but we knew that they were just sounds,
rollicking over the air as carefree as children
trilling and brushing their hairless
faces against one another. Like strangers.
No single word knew another.
They were just affectations,
an illustration of what truth could be,
if one were to concern oneself with truth.
Each stood in faithful assembly,
drawn up tenderly by that tongue,
which now sat in dutiful repose
in your cavernous mouth. Your prose
had taken form. Like another man,
like a separate limb, it occupied the room,
begged my belief, extended itself out to me,
used your eyes—those lashes,
those looks, like fingers, urging—
as if I could somehow give myself to him,
and become your lover by proxy.

Don't be afraid.

Don't be afraid because they love you.
Can't tell you because words are blunt objects
brushfires, boulders rolling
and burning and bowling over the thing itself.
Don't be afraid of life and its terrible sprawl.
All those awful years and their seconds ticking
tiny reminders of the end. Don't
be afraid. It's not make-believe.
It's not a play or a trick or pretend.

Untitled, 10.04.11

It's a terrible thing
that only for some glorious instant
can these feelings be expressed,
with some degree of fidelity.
That a lifetime of despair,
a hundred years' worth of achings
can be distilled into a single
volume of poetry, and all
the substance of one man's life
can be made to fit
in a block of text on a page.