words eye writ

I often think of him,
while swathed by my sheets;
my shoulders scented of apple-green soap.

Or on the bus, where
my thighs and cheeks get warm
so I rub my ears to soften the glow.

I can think of him,
while I read stories or smoke,
but I think of him best when half drunk,

in the quiet dark,
beside him under a streetlamp
or in a bar and he lets me slip into focus.

I’ll never know
how this came to be;
this new heat, chaste in my thoughts.

But it’s the thoughts
not of him, but of the absence
of those who’ve passed, which wrings itself around my sorrow.

On the day he found the ulcer - it glowed,
like a tender gum with molars peaking through.
The skin on his neck, a violent salmon;
that lesion stretched in lustre.
Before his patient dread had passed 
the pebble faded into his trachea,
and his cerulean eyes moaned in flirtation 
with ugly.

“poly·ceph·a·lous. adj -sə̇¦falik\: a condition of having more than one head.” - merriam webster

Now we’ll never blush again
at the slip of our hands on each other’s hot skin,

or wake up as lovers in the wet
nights of summer, holding our sleep and craving each other,

and we can’t ever bathe in
that rock pool of shadow; the inky, mossed well in your heart,

and we can’t take long trips
to the damp foliage and trace out our life on our lips,

or let our eyes sing out 
while in new company and we hear one another’s name fall,

this morning, our loss rolled
on the shore and I knew a mean, happy beauty; like you, loving someone new.

You say you want space.
I accept, remove myself
from your silent orbit.
At night I weave your
hairs into bandages as
sadness licks me damp.
Cajoling your absence
into the fabric of stars.

Age brings a way of sleeping with such terrified quiet;
death just by side, crouched smiling and low.

Age lets the skin on your arms feel like tissue laid on a pond. 
Shows your veins, little blue tadpoles swimming naked beneath.

Age gives dust to your breath, as if a lifetime spent a baker
left you powdered in the scent of hardtack and starch.

Oh, how my family has aged, the men weakened and limping.

Sets of twin kidneys, both badly blistered
and although they function like cousins,
none of us can fix the blood that their being
took.

Hips hiding calcium, snapped on a fault
for someone to replace with slick aluminium.
(Lonely, I’m sure, among gristle-stringed and happy
bone.)

The knowledge of age’s end will stay,
a cap to the pain of our limp.

Yesterday I was
fumbling a sweaty rasp berried-bunch of keys;
copper dipped, wax pressed in the open wounds.
My breath; frosted mist of coffee steam. 
It spins and rains back in my cup.
An orange-peel bug,
lassoed in my eye line, glints back into it’s shadow.
And I, on a morning without you,
hope I don’t withdraw my decision.

Just playing around with a new style today, kind of not that interested to keep drafting it…  I don’t know.

I saw it unfold,
freshly creased;
a note between two school children,
passed behind a school master’s back.

And no, Godot didn’t see that day,
despite that you were waiting.

And every occasion I took
to explain it.
Was stifled in laughter,
although I tried to contain it.

I’m sorry that
my apology was lost
in the sea of absurdity;
a play where you’re protagonist
and the narrator, a stranger.

Its clear she’s afraid of your spotlight,
that crucible,
as she whispered a voice mail. 

Only three words.

And your silence, a cat
on her hot, tin roof.

You know, “Dutch courage”
is a funny phrase;
It implies that the Netherlands were
somehow responsible
for the siege on my heat
that you commanded
at nightfall.

Tonight, I hope you sleep easy,
as this carton of beer
becomes a moat to my slumber.