Easter Monday
When you come back
Burn my effigy,
Bury me at your feet;
there are gilded tombs
where great men are laid out
with slaves to keep them company,
or a wife. (I am already sacrilegious.
I am already dressed in white.)
There is bloodlust and bloodslaked:
there is the cross of your body,
your body by the mouthful;
Unbound, uncrested, flowing
wine dark bruises under
silken robes. There is your
mouth; full bodied and
flowing. There is a price
for knowing. There is a price
for not knowing. There is a
science to our quiet sins.
Count your blessings and trade mistakes. I will be covered, dripping,
head to toe, soaked to sanity;
I will be the motorbike crash; slick, fast and dangerous. I will be your father’s disapproval. The ruler slap, the thunder clap, the Hedonistic Eden quelled unmoving. I will be your First Kiss. your Quick Fuck. the darkest corner at the end of the road. the steamiest backseat of a car. the velvet and lace you hide in a closet; the dirtiest paradise of a bathroom at a bar.
I have been your traitor;
I am not your lover.
I am not your savior.
I am just the one you go to
after Sunday School
to blame all your bad behavior on.
I am just the black-eyed
traveler, picking prison
locks and robbing graves,
making love in abandoned churches,
making daisy chains out of your name.
I am just the leather jacket
Iconoclast, keeping you out past
sunset, keeping you to myself,
keeping Gethsemane and
grenadine and gambits
turned to friction, turned
to chain link fences,
turned to belts unraveled,
turned to ‘back by morning,’
when it’s already blinding
and I am picking plumes
from stolen feathers, tracing
demons into tear ducts,
tearing halos with red teeth
made out of sunlight.
I have been your traitor,
I have held your body;
I have told your mother
you’re not coming home tonight.
This Barbie Is A Boy
with his legs tied in a
perfect arabesque up on the cross.
This Barbie is a starving, stinging, sacrificial
waterfowl singing its last aria for a full audience.
This Barbie is a paradigm of Revenge—
I’ll save everyone who hasn’t saved me,
I’ll be so kind, it will be a reverse
Suffering; how I love you, love you,
love yourself more than you do.
I want the radical reformation of
your health. Promise me you take
care of yourself. Promise me you’re
appreciated, understood, desired,
and of course, venerated. This Barbie,
this plastic caricature of a god-twink,
splayed out on the white linens and lores
woven from threads of Ecstasy and Tragedy–
so close, one leans in and sees the
difference in the stained-glass: one a vanity shot,
one a livestream commissioned for onlyfans,
and one the Truth: hair on the legs and
blood on the sheets, and silver spilling out
of your pockets in the streets. This position,
this fall, this passive resistance, boiling
over the centuries of cruelty: I can take it. I can
take your illness and your lashes, your lemon-rind
kisses along the salt of my thighs, the crashes
of Guilt like a chariot, the golden-grate burn
of your lariat; take you to court and take you to pieces,
take you to Florence and take you to Nice, (it’s
gorgeous there this time of year. It always rains.)
Take the communion and take the wine,
take the temperature and take the cyanide
from the scars just above your ribs,
take your ticket at the station and take the
time off to wave goodbye. Take your tears
(This pain. You feel it, don’t you?
You’ve never felt like that before.)
over the tomb and drape them like a sleeper,
silken and dreaming, take each and every last thing
you do to me, through me, above me with a
blindfold in your hands, bound like the arms you always affix—
take this and this and this, so long as you remember,
I want nothing more than the gentle touch of your lips.
G00d Friday
and I love the sharpness of an ache/the way you love a lightning rod from your open window/and I think about your hands in someone else’s hair/tearing through the knots/finding their way back/to your own/ a perfect circle/of Loneliness’s creation/life is a constant act of sinning/a marvelous, impervious, unethical scale/here’s the feather/here’s your body floating above mine in a dream/once I asked you for a name/and all you gave me was a smile/frayed like a bookmark/peach-fuzz to wine-dark/parable to prism/radiating so much light/I wanted to look away/I was tender/made tender/created and sprung-forth/from the tenuous sea/Don’t look at me/I gnashed/Please/don’t fucking see how the center oozes/into a salt-wave/of tears and trembling and terrible, unhardened Longing/Don’t try and grasp/the already dissolving fathoms/the ancient rhymes that threaten passing glances/don’t go searching for fragments/a tablet half-burned/ripped apart/and still/clearly inked/…here he lies with a man/their arms flung around soft flesh/their lips braiding kisses/like the skittering wings of moths along the ebb-tide’s face/that kind of tenderness/I suppose doesn’t do you any good/it gets you in trouble/it winds your Friday nights/too fast/the disaster of Eros/the soaking wet night-shirts and barefeet/the racing and plunging and never ceasing/a supercut/to stamp in your armchair with a pile of wax seals/ parsing all your symphonies/back to the tin-sound of a toy/sprawled out and drenched/from the floor/you pray for thunder/falling/if only to anticipate/the distraction/of what you’ve already lost
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