And Beautiful Times We Had
As men
shuck oysters
in the open kitchen
I imagine your body
opening
to be eaten
alive. You will die
in a few months
and my life
with you will
decrease
in proportion
to my life which
from your dead
point of view will be
eternal. We unmake
our faces with
pleasures
that disgust us.
One thing I can’t
lose myself is
a tongue. After
the platter of raw
rainbow fish
the oyster
comes
ever-dwelling
in its half shell precisely
chilled. We eat
at the same time.
This
is the food
at the crossing. You
tell me the heart
is its flavor
and you will
digest it for me
once you are ash.
In my mind
we have been
having sex
this whole time to
recreate you
in my mind.
Postmortem Fairytale
Once before time, I was
the awkward damsel
with a wry network of delusions.
I fucked a buff enchantment
until desert sun
revealed him to be a fact
of my own desperation.
Over a breakfast of quartz,
he defined time as the nature of our
never being done.
Dread, my pretty suicidal
roommate, insisted on hanging out
forever. Her blonde hairs
still wave at the back of my chair.
Turns out she was
fucking him too.
When they placed the gas lamp
in my mouth,
my reflex away from heat
caused my jaw to unhinge.
It does not need to be told
that the minute the jaw
became useless to me
was also the first I enjoyed.
To think in language without
the chance to speak is
the closest I’ve come to understanding.
The impeded impulse,
my limestone moat
complete with platelet-colored water.
It does not need to be known
that my eyes are armed
by turrets to know
I am gone except for
the admission of failures,
the prehistoric odor
of my ambitions dripping
from the stalactite of my brain.
It does not need to be felt that the wasp
on my palette
had any desire to obliterate
my taste for taste.
The urgent turned prosthetic,
neat as a foreign film.
Thank you, wasp,
for surrounding me with noise
I never needed, a reverent blackening
genre of disappearing
into my own broke medium.
Good night. If I lie suddenly
with my shadow incorporated
and an alien idea
gagging my face, let me be
kept above ground in the thoughtless
mausoleum of hands.
Enchantment and dread will advise
moving on, but as long
as my body outlasts me,
I would like to be touched harder
to be pressed down.
Cargo
The sky has the salt impediments
of thought. It wants to know
just what exactly it thinks,
but we know the sky is a fact,
just gas and distance, an observation.
The minutes, precocious, exceed the days here,
measured by the appetite of eels.
The feeling of blood as interior shadow
is enough to hold us back
from our lips, from any intention.
We think of what we once were,
a bypassed island
we carried into our guilt.
Once I loved you simply because
it made me feel truthful, like a ship.
Now I love without integrity.
There is no depth but there is
because the ship is going into it.
