Lusinghiero (Revision of "A Bookshelf's Sudden Truth")

You find me sunless and too eager
For horizon, for release from the cryptics
of your mouth which, keyless,
stoppers any sound I might wish to make.

You always dodge
Or deflect gently my syntactic arrows
and they pass their target,
Left to weave aimlessly down
With a careful once-upon-a-time
Gravity into the physics
that litters the paper
I wear in my dreams
and burn in yours.

Our dawns cracked
and splintered off
Like crisp shards of rainbow sherbet,
Like the lashes of the eyes that never
Thought to open,
never sought
To play dew-ruined prisms
for these sky births.

This is when we forgot
that suns set,
missing the way they pour red
Through the last chance cracks
of doors like the blood we keep
in plastic sacks cold, magnolia-limp,
and hideous as the flushless palms
in which you hold them.

Sharp hip against the wall
In this ever-widening room we’ll never leave,
Under the clouds that never
leave us, you could cry but don’t.
The carpet is too rough against your soles.

Before we drown in waves of old
I’ll ask a favor of your
face and reach to curve
the bridge of our several absences
Catching in the notch
beneath my smallest fingernail
the puddle you’ll build out of need.