DEMENTIA

Coal-clotted darkness shadows
everything I am to you.
Heaviness, your animal. My sorrow,
mammoth-sized. The truth outlawed to
dreams, a blood-pink balm of blame.
Yet, I'm lost here without you. Big Game

Hunter - that you were before
the body count - regards the damage.
Deux ex machina seduced my whore.
The magnificent wide acreage
of your body binds my expression,
I am craving a confession.

Undying undertaker, my old ache
is back. Waste your large smirk and style
on some other piece of cake
who pops your party favor for a smile.
How in the world did I get so attached?
The joystick disabled, the fulcrum cracked.

 

ST. GEORGE'S WALTZ

Bay kou bliye, pote mak sonje.
The giver of the blow forgets, the bearer of the scar remembers.
Creole proverb

He turned to her, quickly scanned
the room for his date. A hurricane
of pain took her left eye out.
He forgot to memorize
what was under her hair
as he lifted it. So soft clean
of her to shelter his face there.

Tirelessly searched in too-familiar places.
Gazed up from her paper on the subway.
Glanced down, on a bus, not his hands.
Shook her umbrella- eyed the couple
going into the restaurant.

The consciousness of her clothes
betrayed her. In the glare the neon
from the Haitian church bleated
from across the street,
Bel anteman pa di parade.
A beautiful funeral doesn't guarantee heaven.
She fingered her chain mail
skirt too short for dancing.
Recalled the taste of his spine
all the way down his dragon killer's
back. Her words cut out of his tongue,
his words cut out of her voice.
She scraped, set into a hilt, licked
the falchion, the wine the wine
she mixed red red from his lips.

Lily-of-the-valley stretched
wide round his grandmama's tree.
The scent wide round her waist
as she glided about the room.
The scent of her silence, the lilies
leapt from his blood. Traced
her perfumed arm, a liberator.
A champion, he raised it in a waltz.

His hairy curls, laughter, pleasure
stacked high in her. The phone left
off the cradle, the door locked tight.
His fire unkindled an unkempt race horse.

He lifted her to take her
joy, all she wanted was to learn
to dance. She was a tavern, a dance
hall of heartbeats spun around
his loving. A girl grown dizzy
with desire a loss, her limits
an abrasion of incapacity.

She knocks about in sweaty sleep.
Feverish with wakefulness,
she tracks his city, stones of night.
Dragging the streets wailing
awake the strike of her heart.

In a distinct body, an ambulance of grief.