another, because the arches in the sky aren’t electric enough\ you make the mistake of telling me you want someone to die for you, lose your composure in the early morning. 

in a lab, poised by a burette worth more than my past three outfits put together, the dark red liquid in your beaker

beige-boy holds it out to me, asks me to smell it, i try to and the world moves fast to pull it away, your eyes wide, cheeks high and pretty 

i’m not the type of person you ask those questions 

a man crumbles into sand and i know that he is a cannibal, king of his own world, 

at church his dried skin is the wafers 

so much of some has been done, gone, padded and staring 

place flags and mark the territory 

swirling against later

my ladder down from the night 

the overwarm 

paler night 

straddle anger on a frozen park bench 

of the kitchen 

 and 

fi ll e d with  

   vertigo 

the television, pale light, your elegant face. 

pad, unobtrusive. away to the guest bedroom. 

he’s occasionally said ( with channel-surfing in the background) 

annoyed, watching 

the nerve didn’t really matter. 

It was understandable, what time had done to the mind and love to the body, we saw and trembled and saw and could not look away. This mass of memory fetid and sunken, and so, so, in a whisper, we take our learning.

Everything will leave us. The eating. The love, you, caricature of a control device i expected to have inside me instead of far away, small, radiant. There is a humiliation that rises and falls like tides, and like tides are in the sea the humiliation is in my love for you, boxed and sloshing, surrounded by rock and down low molten. But it’s not without [humor], not without entertainment, being close together is being close enough to touch and touch is enough to entertain these ridicules, shrieking thoughts go quiet to the chanting music, the wall buzzing behind me, the lights and bodies fluorescent underneath them.

Baby, baby, you are gonna be avant garde. We’re waiting out back to do the repairs and all you have to do is shuffle broken in through the doors, and we’ll smile our sickel smiles and we’ll fix you up, cuddle you in and read you the whole history of the world. For the first time since imprisonment, you’ll feel okay. We’ll take care of you. We’re waiting.

lips, teeth and finger tips all stained the exact color of caution.