Since you won't, I will. This is only for my sake, mind you. Give it no purchase. This is not an invective. You know me: a meddler in melancholy who feels more than is good, who charges the shadows of windmills and shakes his own hand in congratulation.

PASSAGE

I felt the grains of evening

and knew your ink to be tangled

in someone else’s hair:

seasonal fools and summer stretchings

sucking in the glints of yellow light

of these cold gaps beneath

the shallow mulberries,

me waiting

while radios spill out humid songs, wretched songs,

songs I don’t really listen to.

Evening flashed and I knew

your wind

gambled in someone else’s gutters,

clattering around

with silken chains

and violins

like crickets rubbing against

the roots of your spines,

loving.

A virgin’s robes are first.

Evening rattled like

white dice, the bony stars

tapping like fingers against teeth and I knew

your skin to be

in someone else’s wires,

a crackling mesh of

black want, the black

of your flicking inner eye

shuttering clicking gasping—

portraits of boldness with eager velvet frames—

who wants to wait no one wants to wait you

can’t help it.

When evening strained, fanned out

in pale strokes of blue light I knew—I knew—

your eyes were other eyes:

hot and keen

marbled green with

the humid refractions of summer,

blinking through rosy pallid

loving.

First to go.