when love runs out
it tears down the door and rips the wallpaper
leaving you in an empty
damaged house
when love runs away
you hope and pray but
those ideas never go
the thoughts about what happened next
remain in your milieu
here she slurs across the room
opens the curtain to a sun-lit storm
her naked form slides in the light
her bosom a sacred curve in shadow
memory inscribed in steel
the stylus breaks on the final stroke
she tells you about her day
how different it is to hear her heart
settle the wings frantic on the fettle drum,
tense skin slender and stretched out
reclining like a field white bony definition
buttock down the look the gasp and the tight hold
is that what remains?
The time
The weaving together of psychic rhymes
The placement of circles around things
the eating
each other sharing
together thing
that haunts normal things
makes a silent sound
that jars and your ribs
no longer play in sequence
the eyes are fixed on the benign
compare this to our time when we fight every day
compare this to when your dance was inspired
by surgical lance and not the church spire
think of the dance
the way that they settle back down to earth
how inscribed these fatal lines of your verse
how deep experience burns and then call it progress