Midnight in my heart
Comes neither too early
Nor too late in my despair.
In calmer moments, I can catch
And dissect my own terror:
The otherness of people; our lives bound inextricably;
The ceaseless aching.

O, Fear, everglow,
An ether through which space and time inexplicably move
A single body carrying in it a consciousness
 scarred by superstition, that prays
And spits the name of god from her mouth--
The constancy of self notwithstanding,
We are all drifting, drifting further,
And the fissures, driven deeper
Under force of self loathing, jealousy, anxiety, hate.

At once, I recoil at the emptiness
Of the hole I fashioned inside myself,
But could never hope to fill.

Brief Flame

In my belly,
some fire remains uncooled.

I feel its configurations:
The crude line of a nose,
the oval of unaverted eyes,
the bold ellipse of an embrace.

Something returns my memory
again and again to that place.

Inside me, it takes the shape of a body,
uninvited, but warm,
beloved.

Because my love is a choice.

Because my love is a choice,
something I have consecrated myself to,
I carry you in me like a body to the grave,
certain, still, undeterred,
in a casket of unutterable promises.

Your body is a love fully formed, a life lived together.
Sometime, years from now, it has already happened.
Our children are grown.

Someday, we will know all we were made for.
Someday.

Last Prayers.

"Oh, God!" I say.
It is a lipless prayer,
one without force or sound.

At twenty-four, I've found
myself without the faculty
for holy speech.

All but this cry:
     --Oh, God!
Feckless, despairing
It leaps from my mouth.

A child born of someone else.
From the faithless,
to god's ears.

When I was younger, I shackled myself
with my own need,
and buried the chains in leaves of paper,
mountains of ink.
I drew my soul in chalk on sidewalks
and in notebooks
and whittled away the kind of character I'd play,
The kind of person I'd be.
I hoped someday I'd come to fill
that unweathered outline, that I'd fit,
rather than redefine, the definition
I'd made of me.

And now, I find my shadow too thin,
and mouth too tired from the recitation
to say again those same uninspired words,
in whatever permutation.

Shall I go now,
Trailing a world by that chain,
and try to reform the feelings
faithfully made, tended carefully
in my youth?

All that is left is to take it up
Those same forms, to reimagine those tired figures
In a new grammar,
And to taste promise with a short tongue,
With mouth closed, lips pressed
Together, abstinent, still,
In the shape of a heart.