Like the hiss and ogle of a train with my head down on the tracks.

a love poem

 

 

 

Forever hold me in your loving arms

and trust in the God who gives you freely

to a man of thence, from that place,

from that time, from that fact of circumsance.

 

And now that you are mine, with no

need for theriaca, may you choose not

to poison the turkeys or the cow. It's

this heat I can't resist.

 

As I watch you, gobbler, strutting

pompous, me still twitching without

a skull, reanimated body of a dead

thing. Vapid by your own elegance

the matre-d of this house of fragrant leaves;

of sweet white confection.

 

The garden waited all winter for you

to arrive and you show up in leggings and a

cropped top. Magniloquent to the springs

margin, reduced in the brightness of light

to the utterance of praise.

 

The butterflies suffer in butterfly silence;

the Buddhist touch themselves with the

tender hard fibers of your blue hair

where the charged magnetic particles

are trapped. I mainline the circle

 

of the day, drawn and discarded, propped up

in eastside doorways, next to northend alleyways,

nodding to this triumph. Have you been

with another man in the last two days

other than me? You smell like s**t,

 

as I am locked in the region of space surrounding

a celestial marzipan of your almond eyes

like a halo or the cray flesh of a dolphinfish.

And the bark voice that has caused such lasting

damage to my lungs, call me masculine now.

 

Adorn me with a thorn crown of bicepts as I

posedown in excellence

to your musk.

Reviews

[Corset]

Fraught with the emotional firing pins of mind pistons sparking to life, flexing the biceps of possibility that with love comes insecurity, she could have been, she could have contemplated, according to the writs of ages to think the deed is as bad as having done it, it must have been hell on soothsayers back in the day. You are brilliant as always but this one is reeking of Hemingway.

[Trigorin]

Not bad. I think some of your word choice, especially in the latter half of the poem, is maybe just a little too overwrought, but you do manage to get the point across very well, and your imagery is especially well-done.