You will allow yourself
to re-settle
into old comforts
on his threadbare sofa
and then enter into
a layered removal
from this other man
full of arguments –
from a disagreeable
who lives uneasily
by designing trip hazards
and elephant traps
In that room air will double
beyond that level
required for meditation
and a balanced life
Find a neutral buoyancy
by letting your lungs
half-fill with his kisses
Do not sink to him
Do not throw anger
back at your other
unless you are ready
to stoke their ire –
redoubled surelye
by your avoiding eye?
Do not find focus
by pin-pricked pain –
held in narrow
concentrations –
unbroken – then set
to scorch again
Your steady point
of magnified aims –
that glass you do not
use to explain –
instead is held
to summon a flame
Do not mark your other’s
yet burnt skin
with borrowed light –
such scarring
will not fade
with time’s passing
Let us idle by pints
and half-cubed shorts
to steady our nerves –
to refine our remarks
and look without trying
to see less censed lies
I settled on love
before I fell – drunk
on your kissed-sips –
your wet heat
on my unfurled tongue –
as if a roll of embers
tipped from your glass –
were left to tumble –
to trail a curlicue
of your intoxications
from your open mouth –
burning to my core
Your infusion
has turned me into
a dance floor fool
I study there in your sudor pool
which through this night is drip-fed
off your hips and thighs in twists
where your legs are no more your legs
but become – as shown in textbooks –
your annotated groin – with pointers
Here is your barrow – lightly grazed
Here is your sliced mound – raw
In my geography – in my history –
in my biology classes – I looked away
Now – older – I work at my lessons –
although I am coming to them late
on this foundation course – of sorts –
of how-to and not-to evening lectures
You kneel down – as my flesh lectern –
and with your open mouth
help me regain my lost confidence –
under instruction – you guide me in study
Those three words
were declared
too quickly for you
by my slow tongue –
with a cluck of uv
Spilt – splattered
like my milk
from my missed
breakfast spoon –
three spills
mopped by you
Let them dry
and mark our time –
still too short of hours
to curdle
to ferment
to be quite – yet
those three words
were spent
by my slow tongue
having found
no other words
to gift to you
Entwinements of sweat
fill this floatation tank –
flooded by drips off sex
as we lap at salt and skin
with gluttonous tongues
in our unbashful fucking
All we see is unseen
fingering and penetration
in our deep-diving minds
as we couple-up into eases
of our ache-numb limbs –
softening in worn lips
We fall into that sudden sleep
of found love’s discomforts –
Never wake from such reverie
To J.S.
It is now measurable –
this effect of you –
by improved
qualities across my skin
You are layer-healing
a soft fixer of
my ripped tiers
and light filler of erosions
You are still as radiant
when back-lit
by another day’s sun
as you run to me
Across you
my dared fingers scan
with ten eyes more
than first had looked
This is our skin tale
of with in and with on
Our time teases us
by obligated constraints
Record it in a diary of sorts –
typeset in italic recall
Dance for me
and my eyes will join in
To J.S.
Waking without you
stretched and pinned
like a readied canvas
bared and laid to light
to be brush-touched
is my missingness
Where my fingers dip
is temporarily lost
along with each kiss
placed as unsaid love –
that naked word
sits readied on my lips
His twisting right foot
takes him past that door
where she had twice –
maybe more –
quick-scurried through
up double-took steps
to a fat goatee face
which she’d anointed hard
with two monkeys’ worth
of her itching kisses
One thousand more
than he had accrued
in those thousand days
of running aways?
As his turned-on-heel
takes another’s embrace
which lifts him higher
as his suddenly-lover
No more counting
or care
of steps now rhymed
and left unnumbered
