A continuum

When we depart

I’ll know your name by heart

Strange seeds sewn

From despotic dark.

With you I’ve grown, your tonic

Sharp, yet lozenges lips like

The hum of a harp. I’ll ask you why

Hypocrisy numb

Why you sift through your words

Before they come, and bite back down

From thrifty stares, when you hold

Me close, rile through my hair.

Feel my breath unfold

Your fools-gold smile

At the man at your ear

With his love-stained phial.

Lulled lexicon remains to mark my grave

When my every bone blackens

In intrepid ache. For the grasp

Of your hand at the back of neck

Glancing up to the nape and down, down

Again. Checking the keys

Of my teeth – a piano you played back then

For friends in your fleeting facade.

I guess, a flicker meanders incandescent

Its specks

Spat hot from your tongue – centre, front

Right and left. Who belongs there to hold you

My imperious imp – limping through flat-toed

Prom shoes to throw up in the sink.

To whose chest are you moulded?

Like a new chassis of bone

And in our liquid night shadows

Where will you grope home?

To an insipid lunch laid like on a lawn

Fills ambiguous bowls, now arms

Opened in awn. Or will you

Give your notions of sleep unto dawn,

Dine alone.

This once

Unlike late-childhood fibs, tendrils of talk

Press my kiss unto you, your invisible corpse.

Sinews skim your lips, force bubbles

Of dark

And your hue, my love, shines

As bright as a star.

How sadly sublime – the rest of your

Nights, scarred hands span your waist

Nestle into your spine. Wandering,

Wondering, forever your smile

Words pestle, to crush on your teeth

Somehow seize and beguile.

Compiled on your side, all worth

Eased into warmth, hair shortly shorn

Mottled skin sides your jaw. Pursed

White flesh throbs in the mauve of

A bite – the divided love of your day

To the thick of the night. So why

In my dismay did I lunge

For the knife? Plunging iron ore

Right into heart strings

Their disporting chime. Hurting,

Heart-spurting like some territorial

Whore

Grinding and snap, snap, snap

The secretarial snare of our lives

On the floor. Smeared

Into the air like a cadence of flowers

The memoir that we still live, share yet years

Within the same hours.