Tell me again
how the water slides
like a snake, tell me how
the bones of your fingers
seethe with thirst,
the emptiness of need
that fills your
milk soft skin.

The embers have
caught in your eyes,
the cup of your mouth
fills with a hungry wild fire.
 
Your heart is throbbing,
your blood is rampant,
capillaries dilating, flushed
with cravings of release.

Make me your first casualty.

.

Have you memorized
the flow of the incidental
music, it is subsonic but
the water gets it like a
cloud bursting. It is the
anticipation of a first touch,
a tongue tasting the distance
across the terminals of a battery,
the frequency response of electrons
jumping between bodies.
The briefest creation of
mythologies, the moment
when gods are born.
There is a hymn
I’ll whisper into the
space of a breath
if you’ll raise your lips.

.

You were right, I only seek your
darkness. The way your collar bone
blocks the light, the red velvet
hole your heart hides in,
the penumbra gathering along
the belly of your fingers when you
make a fist. I want to exist at the
horizon where the day cauterizes
into night. The shadows seeping
across lithe continents of flesh.
A ghost to accompany yours, dragging
around your ramshackle bones.
To hide in the shade of your breath.

.

I have lost my teeth, they were in
a box padded with my tongue.
I’m coming up for air along the
seams of the north Atlantic.
The water is heavy enough to mask
my silence, to hide the cordage
of my hands.  Already barnacled,
already scavenged. The broadside
of an axe slips, it is not blunt
enough to save itself. Swinging
against currents.  Waiting to rest.
A bit never found in my mouth.
My name is percussive,
the air held hitting the air
waiting in you.  Who is wanting,
the wave or the rocks? Let’s let
the remains be soft.

.