Your sunned hair dangles,
O child of Pierus, against the drooping
of unmade sable sheets, like stained ribbons,
or the chafing sugar hem of perchance or rubs,
which grazes as it billows,
like stillborn grass beneath the bent, branching wind,
of January on the wintered skin
and a sleeping spine.
In the ill ebbing of veins,
hollowed intestines, & the silk-ridged flesh,
the waxpaper'd soul knows the taste
of salt and leaf-breath, and glossy insects,
Only in the warm gleam of hardened tree blood,
flourishing sweetness turned into a buried memory stone;
O Mnemosyne, your refractive scent, your mouth eludes
our self-regenerating, self-devouring cells.
There are girls, and boys,
who bathe & soap themselves:
god-destroyers and gods,
masturbation-blessed, metal-wrapped iconoclasts,
with their halo-molassed lips, their seastorm eyes.
My stillness hides my pulsing to the loveliness,
to the breaths that go shallow-quick,
I dissolve against their blood-rosy cheeks, the satin jawbones,
but tracing the corded pathways
of their opuses, movements,
O muses,
there are only bird shadows,
jackdaws and magpies in grey rain.
