do you disappear?

i spied you.
with your fingers in the soil,
in the suitcase where you kept your heart,
for the unholy leagues between bay and battery;
where you let cigarette smoke climb-sexy-along
the arcs and angles of your hope.

i:
opened the gate of my ribs-its hinges rusted from disuse-to let the banshee gust of you drink;
soured the undersides of dandelion petals with fallout and homeless neutrons;
gave spears to apes to hunt thunderheads to feed their cowering hearts with stormshine;
watered our death valley "t zones" with the sight of one hundred million fire flowers punching holes in mother night;
was Ilium at your feet-excavated at last from the trust razed by treachery

while your back was leaving photograms in Wrigley
while you numbed your throat with trust fund and even cried in dreams,
i sat still and small for you
in the God's-love lavender of morning in America.

VI.

I am fine with your bullets decomposing in my blood,

Your tiny iron atoms burning in my smile.

Hallelujah to the arcs of lightning in your fingers.

Hallelujah to the almost unbearable summer dusk of your presence.

εγω εμι for the smoky coffee dream of your kiss.

Forever reds into the firearm devil flowers of the America for which we retreated to the desert,

When we were torches in the darkness,

punching holes in hell with our tiny, supernova lives.

I am glad for the archangel elegy of your nakedness,

In the asphalt spearing through mountains and farms and plains

And deserts into the sinking sun in the western edge of dream.

And I find a breath for you again in the who is who was who’s coming

Of the savage explosion of ghosts and orchids

Singing songs that fill with fire the space between the Pleiades.

When you are cooling between my sheets.

When you are crushed and light and numb of feet.

When you are the question mark,

That tells me how to speak.

When.

You are.

The never.

Again.

When you are the cure the kill the symptom,

And then come back to settle

For the love that I have left.

waves crash.

Dear hydrogen cloud whose fingers wrap around my heart to keep it from beating,

I can smell you in the curved glass.
You are the sense memory brought close by a simple trick of physics,
But you are real enough that I cannot breathe through you.

I can taste you in the open eyes.
The eyes that burn in sleepless fission.
The eyes that beg for a new century
Already.

You are the perfect simplicity.
The sound of honey that is breathing under water in the large,
Sad-eyed droplet of a summer storm that will never end because I, in love, kissed her hard in it
And so will live forever there
If I am redeemed of all my other sins.

You touch the key that lingers underneath the songs we sing together
And alone
In the thousand armed Kali of America.

And you see the hungry evidence of lilacs and the hollow carved-out hope of miles dying underneath our scars and open lungs
Our broken, arrogant hearts that do nothing but promise
Exactly because when the waves crash and shatter
When they howl and starve and carve and break and cower
When they revenge and resist
When they give off and give out and give up and give in
When they believe,
Promises are plenty.

a prayer.

God forbid
or God at least forgive
the hurt
that we let ourselves learn.
help remake
the hearts
that we bend and break apart.

help us breathe
underneath
the crushing silence
of these lonely rooms.

and when we've gone
and the things we've said
our pretty promises
sink into the walls
and leave a stain
that looks just like
the face of Jesus Christ

help us see
that even if it's Him
the past is still gone
the innocence can linger on
help the hope to hold strong
when the past is gone.

the past is gone.