(For the Childfree)
Very young, Prufrock slipped us poisoned spoons:
we want to go then, you and I as the evening
is spread out so much we make ruins
of our home. I try to wash the dishes glistening
still in Munich hands stroking the gothic stone
of the Marienplatz, not our dirty cottons oh,
let us go, then, the prong of your countenance split
in the opium den we affixed for an illness of hiding
our hawkdreams that turned unpredatory clipped
by our chemicals. We’re here for abiding
a beckon, an imagined script:
“Leave the children brining
in the womb. Let the diamond render,
pleasure is > knack for legal tender.”
(For Stealth)
Pleasure is > knack for legal tender.
I stole your future with the dowry
of a body turned object like a bartender
slinging half-full potions, a theory
half-baked into trick pies of raspberry
blood. I stole an architect’s plans. He
was a widower penciling barely
visible facts about her neck. But it wasn't free
for me to sit with his grief, so I took
my tithe and I left his money soaked
in tears, protective paper tube in tow, those crook
-ed buildings waiting to feel rain, revoked
from potential. I throw the blueprint flag, high
on my ability to liquefy.
(For Time, Which Was Already Busted)
On my ability to liquefy:
inside the wilted cells of brain I’ll find
a shape. Will it look like lions gilded in
seizure? Will I know their graceful manes
are your blue grief, flinging flags of scarlet haze?
Those anomalies, that make me wake to wars
between the lakes of shallow neurons and the tired plains
of permanence, sway. This is the way
I sprain my neck against forgetting,
cracked in my need to sort what I’ve
already twisted in the pink of this
new cortex, formed bright in balanced
reason and wet with mists of worry: this is
part and parcel for falling paths.
