THE CROWNING
Lucy’s pond reflective skin
simulated a steady infusion of surprise
and delight.
She licked each finger absorbing civility and consciousness.
The sketch is fading. “I don’t believe it should be this way,
but I’ll do it anyway.”
“Isn’t it a lovely night Dynamo?”
“Did you say sentiment or sediment?”
He wouldn’t wear any clothes. Everything
was whispers, the corrosion of
satisfaction.
“You have lost almost everyone you love,” cried Lucy,
her fingers grappling
her belly. “Call my lover,
for your final seconds.”
“Your breath is voluntary
making you making me
love you, still.”
“Make me beautiful again,
without searching your
pockets for razors.”
Look at me, I am your reflection.
I’m always looking at you, for you.
Do not rush this ceremony, the deducing of shadows.
“I am happy here detached from my body.”
“There is nothing to stop this incongruity.”
Thump.
Thump.
“I am met with constant hostility.”
“You are a trained lover.”
Dynamo walked through the forest
dreary and heavy. “She is a pleasure.
She gives me pleasure.
She tries.” Father and Mother and Margaret deprived
of moisture choke down the mirth in death.
Their love became mercenary,
a savage trivia,
especially during sexual punishment.
Lucy is a watercolor,
a half-imagined thing,
a salvation of cloak and dagger.
Her mouth is a tower in flames,
smiling politely as the dead
peer out from inside. This is paradise,
a framed transparency
the position of her hips
stained in agony. This is paradise.
Everything has been said. Only the tribal confrontation
for tongue remains.
Yet, no city, no images come, no poppies in the rain, no severance,
no Jesus, and no chains.
“Only cover your eyes and sigh.”
It is called morning, a revolutionary pleasure,
the profile of a tongue in a knot.
“What is the truth about this landscape?”
“To whom do I sing as I wander up the path?”
“You are beautiful and mad, the mirror of a city.”
“Even when we are talking of ghosts,
with our clothes off, the afterlife
only strategic for demons,
our legs and our arms
make motion of these words,
the trees and the leaves
the dead and the living
the argument
continues.”
Lucy sank her teeth into Dynamo’s chest
and began sucking at the anti-image.
“What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.”[1]
“The afterlife is time travel.”
“Who invited you to dinner?”
“Be serious.”
“The screams of ghosts are vanishing
desperately in the company of disappearing ink.”
Dynamo awoke to the stench of horseshit,
a wafting invasion of spirit.
Lucy crawled into his armpit and
nestled her tiny body
into his caves and holes
and there disengaged from
his throat and loins
a treachery not quite her own.
“You wait this time in hunger.”
“You behave like a goddamned wheelbarrow.”
“All our faces have wings,
and all our wings are clipped.”
A dead forest is a prison, a riddle,
an angel watching foolishly
slick music
burning their backs
bent in morning.
“Around me you animate yourself.”
“I don’t know if there is time in this world
for miscommunication.”
Dear Lucy,
Being with you is like hunting
for a drunken comment
stranded on a dry tongue. At a great distance
you never tasted so strange. But when we mirror
each other, you become science fiction. The door
opens and you are merely domestic
skin disguised as art.
And upon your revision
at the edge of withdrawal
when deep emotion clings
to each squinting map of your youth
you will turn
mysteriously,
sigh,
a translation, or
a symbol an immediate telegram
a new language
letters and numbers,
a rose petal antiquated
with yesterday’s lover.
Remember eternity,
how directionless its graceful miles
lead between song and myth, how pure
the air was before our dreams,
nasty, short, and brittle
skulls half-eaten,
and the naked loss of metaphor
trembles
remembering the very bones
we have left behind.
Dynamo
“I love you, yet, I wander,
through your weary prose,
impatient for poetry.
I tell you darling,
this transformation,
this bursting forth,
a bouquet of flowers
bloodied from bullfighting
the substance of a single image. Adam and Eve
a comprehensive melancholy,
all the unemployed coffins,
the bridges and rooftops,
the drawings of still clouds,
I feel sorry for you,
unaware of your attachment,
to the few strings left to pull,
your teeth from the doorknob,
your hair shaven by shaky hand,
you eyeballs stitched into sand castles
your faces screaming at the tide, to love, to love,
unaccustomed to magic, the sacrificial loneliness
in beauty.
My poetry is suspicious of you,
born from dance,
like a dream of your watery eyes,
the silhouette of an imaginary rose.
There is nothing more desperate
than yesterday.”
This is paradise,
that boundary line
where love is outlined white,
liberated like a ghost,
many miles forward and backward
a childish grace answered by the last
abyss, a fake dream, a camera flash,
a time traveler invited to dinner
for the last time.
Lucy invited Dynamo inside. All of their children
crawled the floor with apples in their mouths,
a mild garnish lathered their bald flesh.
“Which do you prefer?”
“None.”
Lucy crossed and uncrossed her legs
in a dream of lilies, more beautiful than her
ravaged city. “Say nothing more. Say nothing
that will erect staircases between us.
Say nothing more.”
“We are both independent of images. We are liars.
I am covered in cloud,
and you are the taste of lemon
on my cunt. In these erotic musings
you are a beautiful boy
decayed an equivalent being
a crow cawing its head off,
a Valentine pretending
a bullet hole.”
“One touch of moonlight
stronger than my fingers tight
the unsuspected shooters glance
the proposition of a dance.”
“‘I hope that we shall find that we have one tongue,’[2]
that poems mistake pretending
for a hovering threat.”
Dynamo and Lucy lay upon the shared grave
of his family. “Could this have ever
been an alphabet, a place for answers?”
Lucy made a fire in her mouth and sucked
Dynamo’s skin until he was comforted
by bones, a real child
born a silhouette,
sucking every memory
from an imaginary rose.
Birds fly away.
A little boy in the forest splashes in the water
dancing,
listening to unfamiliar sounds.
