These Pleasures, Suffered As a Means

By - Oct 5, 2018


I worship my or any lips that say
in silence my love’s name.
I worship shadow that seems shadow bled
of her by sharpest sight.
My love stands in the corner of the room
and it breathes and beats as a harvest of ripe spasm.
She is the vein in the palm of my left hand,
or an eyelash fallen to an open eye.
My blood jumps to her when she raises her flesh
to feed me its bright silk;

just so each cricket scraped its violin-like
thigh about Christ’s friends as God
was laid a withered flower in their hands;
and as such my love she sleeps curled against me.
I am a frenzy to her likes and pains; while
to suck her neck’s to eat the flesh of a cloud.

Her fingernails untangle bruised vein;
when I tell my love her body’s a spiral staircase
through which I melting walk, she laughs.
Her throat falls like rain upon the skin of her shoulders.

At such times, she says, ‘my love he lies sleeping
in the kitchen of my palm; he has
his head in a pot of boiled ginger, and his fingers
in a cup of warm cream.  His sword
that is an old, wooden spoon
lies silent by his hand.’  I laugh and smile,

and suck the splinters of my penis from her throat.
The penis fractures at its climax, and one’s lover is struck
with the splinters of its broken form; like a drinking glass
on stone it darts and fractures; and where it touches
is a wound, as it is a wound, as the skin
has been torn to let the bloods mix.