she delves

she delves and i am bitten

by the frost clinging to the eaves

of all these men who told me 

her place was held fast.

she dives down and down

and i am watching the 

gravity of life suck

her into a purple void.

i am a weak stitch,

unbroidered at once

by the fallacies of

the politicians of faith;

so much so that blood

comes from the eyes and

tears from the throat;

i am a spent coin at last.

what she wants is what she

cannot see without the

abridgment of her prison sentence.

and lately i've played a fool,

conjuring the specters of 

worst-worn scriptures i'd

memorized in youth.

how they told me i am the

first and the last, and she

the second moon in an orbit

of dying stars;

how her vehicle was driven

softly along a gilded path 

and that i was to be her

captor with a small net.

the policy of the unquestioned

elders implied that her 

womb was a place of sacrosanct

harmony with their god,

and that from the dawn of eve,

she was to suffer the depravity

of the unsalted sea and weep

tears of joy for everything not hers.

i delivered her evidence, her

blue truth, in buckets filled

with the oils of distrust and

maleficent good-knowing.

i imparted from my ego the

episodes of reconciliation

one makes when the heavens

of the forgotten are closed up.

i never said no. i don't say no.

i never said can't. i don't say can't

but i idled in my stupor, drinking

in her benevolence like a dog.

and i pissed on her pride the

day i forgot to let her free;

shit on her love the day

i did nothing but sit there and smile;

the smile of the drunken

fool who winks at the prophets

and tells himself he's the 

master of all that he sees.

can you not hear that thunder 

in the ephemeral distance,

that sings with the voice of

the lost and the flutes of Eros?

she loves. she loves from her 

plundered bosom, giving up her

flesh and her latitudes and her

fine, silk, aromatic tempers,

so that i may crouch in an 

un-man's fear, huddle in a boy's

peppered hubris, cower in a

long shadow of selfsame service.

i am all out of hope when

i see her bring the fog home,

and she drifts and drifts and 

clamors for the side of her ship

like that, her fingertips

bleeding from the ridicule

of the ignorant and the 

intelligent, who don't get it.

she is on a journey without

a path, an affront to my 

foolish male sensibilities,

which require a map.

i am shouting!

i am shouting

at the mirror

at my cold, senseless self.

that i missed her

meteor is such blindness; 

that i allowed myself to

labor under the sugar of fools;

that i listened to the drool

of men who required of me

their undivided attentions, but 

divided me from my epic truth.

i'm writing this while drunk

on the music of my youth;

inside tearing to shreds the

patently stupid words of priests.

she delves and i am bitten

by the frost clinging to the eaves

of all those men who told me 

her place was held fast.

she dives down and down

and i am watching the 

gravity of life suck

her into a purple void.

she deserves what she wants,

that's really the thing of it.

and i must keep water in the well

from which i must wash her

new-soiled feet, the feet with

which she walks her thousand miles

away from what she was, and 

toward what she is,

so that she comes back to me,

a better fool for her,

a better fool for love,

a better me