Come on my heart, my amorous cat,

               and keep away from me your claws.

                                                          

Baudelaire

Now that I have touched
this adored body, I hear
the dead throbs of lip dementia.
Now that I have touched the cuts
that trim this adorned throat, 
I feel melt in me, the senses
blend as one.  Never will a kiss sting,
word hurt (under covers, over heards).
Caressing constructed flesh, the shears coil
around where our hearts would be
meeting our worst troubles.  This is what gets me
every time:  the thirst—the midnight drink of venom
shot through a tired thumb. 

From wildly different angles on Earth,
brushstrokes craft our closeness.
In someone else’s painting, red bleeds
down my cheeks.  Your eyes burn 
like carefully constructed fires.
                       
 Clouds shake and wrap their laughter
 around us. A little bird hiding in the dark green
 is a promise I made you.
  
 Confronted with indecision, the artist
 chooses to mute our urgency in pastels
 and wonders whether to hang this work
 or tuck it away as a reminder of his toil.
  
 Quickly, all traces of us are washed
 from his brush.  That little bird hiding in the dark green
 flees. 

So it has come to gravel
grasped in fists.  An unstoppable capsule
slumps in the middle of my throat. 
The back of your neck is slightly
out of reach.
  
 The idiot-light should have been blinking
 for years.  The agreement is slightly skewed,
 but statistically, it all works out.  Let it go.
 Let it go and laugh.  This is the first day of
 ‘I know I can.’
  
 Says me this once at swivel pitch—
 how our planets mix.  How sudden do we,
 my pretty genius. 

An ever-present sun
confuses the passing of days, years,
so:
  
 it’s not your fault
 you still think it’s 1953.  We drugged you.
 Your stint at that milk farm
 was only a couple of years, but it was just enough time
 to nudge Chinatown a touch to the north,
 adjust a few inconvenient trees, 
 and forge a few more churro stands (for the kids).
  
 The tea rooms you frequented
 have failed, and behind your back,
 people say you’ve gotten soft in the middle—
 a pillow.  Being kind to yourself
 is hard work.  But the limelight was so forgiving then,
 so even when we did peek behind your plush curtains,
 we hardly noticed the crooked wigs 
 on all your weathered marionettes.
  
 No one will blame you.  Here, 
 we love a fake.  Just get some work done,
 and remember that away from us, 
 we love you more. 

My deathbed grows naturally
as rings on a tree.  Layer upon layer
the tissue renews.  My love leaves me
like a needless eyelash.
  
 If heaven is a horse
 on its hind legs, then altitude 
 is on my side.  Tho’ we are close,
 you are not mine. 

 In the garden, you lay
 on a single blade
 as darkness binds pockets
 of falling light.  **VOID**
 You see evening as it drops
 its diary.  Glimmer, over here.
  
 Over here, my forehead is found
 pressed between two stones.  Impressed
 by the glow, I see it all without you.  
 No one makes mortals shine like this.
 Shimmy.
  
 Clouds unmatched, unmasked—
 caress me.  Moist-givings
 given to our tongues, seeking out 
 the eye’s salt mine.  Things appear
 in the wrong places (the wind).
  
 Before you sleep, you think
 of the undone.  Tell me, again,
 why I am here.  Touch me
 with the softness of a vein.  Find me—
 I’m over here—looking for better light words
 than the ones that start gl- and shhh-… 

The night before, I swam in the rocky side of the Aegean, 
 where I needed a hand to balance back to shore.
 There was that one stone in the middle of the bay
 where we met after a glass of homemade wine.
 I put a few stones in my pocket for remembrance,
 and thought about all the things I do not know.  
  
 On our way back up the gorge, each turn of the road
 revealed a different prize. At one, brightly hued bee boxes. 
 The next—a grove of fig trees creeping past my line of sight.
 A miniature candlelit monastery at the last—with someone’s prayer
 still tucked inside.  
  
 The far off tinkling of goat bells reminds me now
 that I had no idea what the next night
 would gift me.  

 I never take full advantage 
 of my landscapes.  I try
 too hard to fall in love.  Lust
 is where I land.  Still surprised
 to find myself in an invisible line—
 in which I have no idea
 I am waiting. 

 If you think I’m an artist,
 I am one.  Just today
 I made a watercolor
 of the cerebellum.  
 It’s lovely, really—
 Come take a look at her
 in the full-bodied feel 
 of sundown. 

This morning, verbs choke me.  
Startled up, tattered, and forgotten,
the floor falls, but I scrape myself up.
Poetry does not reveal itself so easily.

Finding my feel, I decide
to limit my face intake.
Forging through sea glass, dolphins,
and plastic by-products, you speak softly
of what I deserve.  Neither of us
picture ourselves in danger.

By mid-afternoon, we hang a soft sheet.
Birds huddle in the sun, half-asleep nearby.
We try and try.