The Metallurgist’s Child

Where in the cupboard she likely lingers still,
behind noisy doors that once held back horses
and held in a mother who knotted her apron
until it was small, and she, forgetful,
I dream standing upright of a metallurgist’s child,
learning to sinter her silver ghosts
and reciting psalms she conjures from memory
to fall, as mercury,
drop
by
drop
into dream.

Come back to me with lips of molten lead;
lure me in with the viral romance
of nape-neck kisses and white collar crime,
and if I swoon standing near enough the ledge
that the leering storm cracks once its whip
and drags my cornstalk heart to wilting,
be fearful not of the rain, darling,
for you were always a husk yourself,
crinkling sun-crisp, with smoke
at your edges and soot in your eyes.

Just be thankful our end has symmetry.

Monsters

It’s getting close to dark,
and the bruises on my face
too-closely match those
of the sky.

There are promiscuous
woolly wrinkles where
my cheeks ought to be,
and the rain falls
fat and heavy like my
heart.

The police came and went.
They wanted to put
a raw steak on my
wounds, but I laughed them
all the way back
to the station,
then phoned to tell them
it’s bad decisions
that got me here.

I’ve had my fill
of bad decisions.

The ambulance
has been disemboweled.
Its remains are the stains
on my teeth.

I try to tell you
how much I’ve missed you,
but this isn’t the place
for poetry,
and my voice is lost
beneath the weight
of the world
and the screams
of the interstate.

I feel like a kid
trying to explain where
the monsters came from.

Prison-Padded

Once, I was the heavyweight
champion of the world. I was
a marvel in the public eye, but
I was shedding weight classes
like snakeskin, molting down to
featherweight, talon-gouging
new notches in my belt to hold
up my genes, and what was I?
What the fuck was I but another
bottom feeder scurrying along the
sediment, trying to find meaning
in anything and too blind to see the
importance of everything.

For once my pockets are prison-
padded, but I’d give up this whole
head start for another shot at the
champ.

Apocalypse (Please)

All I can think of
is the last breathless kiss -
the last three words to slip
from your chemical lips,
and were the locomotive of the end
to run me down tonight -
to iron me flat like a penny
placed gingerly on its tracks -
I’d think it a fitting end for a man
finally found.

Swiss-Made Woman

I’ll never forget the look
she gave me after
she came. It was her
way of saying that
I was one fuck closer
to outliving my usefulness -
that she lived in a world
in which I could only,
untenably, exist.

Between her thighs, or at
the bottom of her ballet dancer
spine (it’s a matter of perspective,
really), is where empires have
fallen.  I used to wonder
if she ever thought back to
pushing that first domino.  I
wondered which domino I was.

She was a Swiss-made woman,
and I always admired her
craftsmanship.  I wanted to dip
my fingertips in cartographer’s
ink and make a map of her -
to make lonely mountains
of her hipbones, oceans of her
eyes - to write here be dragons!
on her lips, and warn unwary
adventurers of her smile.

She couldn’t have cut
more daylight out of me
with a thousand knives
than with that smile.

When we fucked, I
blew out the candles
to escape it.  There are
no differences in the
dark.  For all its depth,
there is no room for
inadequacy.  She never
complained when I took her
down there.  I suppose she
must have liked it better
that way too.

I always knew what awaited
me, though,  when the lights came
back on.  The carnivore stare that
denied all my alcoholic dreams
of a world where sobriety and
solace deny physics and
occupy the same space.  Of
sharing that world with her.

Every time, when it was over
and she dressed to go, and I
thought it would never happen
again, not like that, I asked for
death.  When I looked
into eyes that used to go
forever and no longer saw the
sea, I begged her to kill me.

She never did, of course.
That was far too much
like sleep for a Swiss-made
woman to give me.

Squeeze the Bullet Down

Squeeze the bullet down.

Put it deep in your throat,
close your eyes and swallow
hard. Don’t let that
trickster’s synapse fire.

Squeeze the bullet down,
down to the bottom of the bin
where old vegetable scraps
turn to compost. Smash it
to needles and find yourself a
haystack, in an unused barn on an
unused farm, one where the cows
have been permanently put
out to pasture.

Squeeze the bullet down.

Taste it, and find that it
tastes of the middle ground
between whispered hellos
and shouted goodbyes.
Maybe it tastes a bit like
that summer when you and she
and all your friends
found love, and maybe
for some of them
it would last forever,
but not for you.

Squeeze the bullet down,
because if the bullet
is allowed to fire, it’s
going to do the sort of damage,
that no amount of scalpels
and morphine can repair. All
the steady doctor hands and steady
doctor frowns won’t keep her
out of triage for long.

Squeeze the bullet down.

Hide it behind teeth and lips
that smile like they aren’t
suppressing an arsenal.
Like they aren’t
superheroes. Squeeze it down,
because it is not of you.
It’s another sort of person
that shoots first,
and asks questions later.

Sexual Frankenstein

I wait for them,
drunk-numb,
at the crux of two streets
trafficked by more danger
than I’ve been conditioned
to handle.

They are too good for me,
these Christian girls,
with their memory foam flesh -
their crosses, worn more
out of custom
than sincerity.

I stumble & stammer
around them,
as much a neanderthal
as when we dwelt in caves.

They are too good for me,
these Christian girls;
but at oh-god-thirty in the morning
they’re all creatured-out,
crashing like waves
for want of the sky,
& I’m the only one
who’s good for a quick fix.

I wait for them,
drunk-numb.
I wait for the smell
of Hollister & college sex -
for the slack jaws
& listless eyes
of girls who aren’t creative enough
to suffer.

I won’t be their first
of the night:
their first bump,
their first drag,
their first fuck;
but I’ll exact payment
for services rendered
all the same.

This night gets heavier
by the second.

My mind turn to you,
as it always does
when the sky turns to ink,
& the pavement to ice,
& I need the comfort
of your high-society softness.

I wait for them,
drunk-numb. They are
too good for me,
these Christian girls;
you are the heart
& the head,
but they are the gut
& the loins
& the curled toes
& the grimace
of ecstasy & of solace.

My patchwork Frankenstein love
can never be complete
without both of you.

They come to me,
these Christian girls,
at the crux of two streets
trafficked by more pleasure
than I’ve been conditioned
to think I deserve.

I take them
in the back corner of the night,
somewhere between the junkies
thanking their crank
for holding them back from the noose,
& the varicolored glint
of the moon on a knife
that will cut short a dream or two
before the night is through.

I lift their skirts
to see where empires have fallen,
& I’m glad mine fell
long ago.

Maybe some day,
after all of this,
you & I
can rebuild it.

Awake

I am awake in the hours after midnight,
in those fossilized seconds
when things are close enough to quiet
that every noise flows down
like liquid thunder to your core,
& strikes a shiver in your heart.

When things are close enough to dark
that you become so fascinated by light
you time the beacon blinks
of all the tiny diodes,
when you can hear every sputtering flash
scream like lightning beyond your eyelids.

When things are close enough to still
that you are pried loose
from the distractions of the day,
& all that’s left
are the should haves
& what ifs
& why nots
of another day
squandered.

I am awake for the graveyard shift,
beside the beleaguered legions
for whom drawn shades and sunrise
hold much deeper meaning
than for you & I,
for whom the seaside sway of a pretty girl
who struts beneath the freckled sky
is its own diary entry,
its own cherished memory.

I am awake
when the serpent hiss of railway inertia
is the object of focus,
rather than ambient noise.

I am awake
when the streets shrug off their pavement
and take on the ambient flicker
of decaying streetlights.

I am awake
when every porcelain specter is ominous,
& gaunt,
& yet somehow reassuring.

I do not envy the sleeping many,
those who never feel
the tensile strength
of creativity drawn taut by fatigue,
or taste the air
when all reverberation fades
& what it leaves behind
is free from the aspartame dirge
of the day.

I do not envy you
& I ask you not to pity me
for, of the two of us,
I am the one
awake.

Betrayal

betrayal

under the moon

flapping paper held
in desert wind

quill scratching
like storm-borne sand

the desert is where I live
where there are no others
except the constant wind
my unconstant companion

I lied once
broke faith once
lost myself forever
once

long ago
the coin flew golden high
spinning
and fell to a choice

I chose and left the coin
and redemption
behind

now
there is no roaring
like the wind in me
there is no heat
like the hate in me

yet
for my own sake
I write my name each moon
the hope is pain to me
and I deserve pain bought long ago

under this desert moon