I threw you off the top as if you didn’t matter– was tired
of keeping you warm at night; of taking your head from
out hands as you wept.
Your demands are not in keeping with a free and
fast-enraptur’d heart and so I take you to the rooftop:
the flames here cannot singe me; licking tips catch
on the blanket breaking from its careful swaddle
kissing like cigarettes the holes to catch your tiny
fingers in the way I now tuck my thumb inside a
plaintive fist nobody noticed. The tower is always
burning and I, at home, can only hear the terror of
these mortal men as voices of a screaming ghost left
writhing, caught in coveted and phosphorescent glory;
ablaze, we are surprised by your propensity for
death– lie still and bloody having whet your appetite
for the temperature of change as reprehensible in its
demands as it was unphased by having not been first
invited. Have I since passed so long ago I now
forget my limbs are not of flesh but something else,
entirely? Ash and spark demark the place where air
and life collide; provide us with the backdrop for
this moment– a baby floating in slow motion, adorned by
the cherubic curl of linen snapping in the wind beneath
him, chubby arms extend toward
the trees so far below they might as well be painted
stucco pissed on by the passing dog. I half expect a
trainset to snake through all these plastic trees;
posed figurines kept frozen just to capture perfect
moments imagined by those incapacitated by the need
to flee in their absence. I turn away before the
landing, half believing smoke might caress you as you are;
could there not be another lifetime lived inside the
one it takes for you to hit the ground–? Ours
seem to go on forever, here, as spent against my hand
tracing the sandstone wall; that feeling of what is not
there becoming all my songs. I forget
you; you forget me; another comes to pass as if it
matters not who hears the way I can describe
the coming springtime from the singing of the birds,
my hand cradling your cock– our bed is nothing
sacrosanct, merely a place you’re passing through.
We decide it’s not romantic to proclaim a thing so
inconvenient as a heart that can be spurned and so I
dress you as a garden meant to be guarded with this
falcon in its hood: I am the palm you turn to in
uneasiness as blinding light became the signal first,
for you to hunt and only later, look around.
Black nails, black earth from these efforts first
emerge as charcoal in a graveyard and chicken-scratch
the way I mark the days as opposed to the
absence of their faces. We forgive the fallen fortitude
its grace in our abandon’d loves and feathered nests
left nestled in their branches–
you are the lady of a tremulous horde
and silence will become us.