Dining of the Hungry and the Full

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Dining of the Hungry and the Full

The serpent
wears our clothes
and sheds the skin
to mend the symptoms
of the euthanasia,
droplets fresh and moist –
a sea of prickling salt
gives a place to drowse in
as the envenomed chrysalis
metamorphoses and sews
a threnody of pain
for a daisy plucked in confusion;
I have slept through
the un-seaming
of the Sun
into a nocturno,
waiting for Lady Justice to weight me
like a leaf of Autumn.
Asking the veins romancing the flesh
What is the bruto
of the honeycomb
behind the lung?
When your ribcage is my prison
and I rattle the bars
in Morse code;
a seeming improvement
of my previous self
that was an armless mime.

I have you
and I have you not,
like a game
of peons under masks
and self-inflicted scars,
like blades pointed upwards
on our palms
to balance words we speak
and screech out verdicts;
This heart,
this organ that if pricked
would make mess and chaos
and would cut down a tree
just to be named
with something that is true,
just to be stitched with a golden thread
and rot prettier under earth –
would be this in a verse
as much as it would be in this room
yet we would all
laugh with the clown,
blind in our idolatry
of Fortuna,
yearning to be that pastel
that chalks the sky
for the eyes first time opened
and waiting to melt down
right into someone’s throat.

So I am confined
into chambers –
and so I am demurred
to a single sheet of paper,
a single silent note
of a violinist
who stopped the orchestra
just to whisper to the gluttonous theater
of the weariness of the tune;
so I am but a frog leg
on the bottom of the Circe’s cauldron
brewed and served to hands
that do not yet know
how to adore the dying.
But, most importantly,
I am that love letter,
stuffed into your bellybutton
while you slumbered,
that won’t be stamped
and sent and read
until there is no more blood in me
and I am but the husk
of what was rumored
to be Love.