At Ease

The magic:
If you hold your wet hand up to a candle in the dark,
it steams,
The watersmoke shimmering up to mingle with your breath.
I have
A friend who snores.
She knows
To lie with me in the morning beneath the ballooning curtains
without speaking,
Knows what it is to swallow her own head.
We drift,
Loose-eyed, lolling, resting on placid stomachs.
Sometimes, blinks.
I wonder what it is to line up the blood like attentive soldiers,
the endless
Rigid parallels of cited tables.
Dawn cracks
And sparks in the dimples of her pupils every few weeks;
I sigh
Into another lake of a month.
She snores.

Overwhelmed

I will unfold my heresies
In sheets, in droves of threads
That pool at my knees.
This litany of faults
And drives unquenched
Crunch in around my eyes,
Crush the rings of my temples
Into a massy pulp.
I shake at night, asleep,
Held in place beneath the weight
Of feathers,
Suspended somewhere on a string
Between my thirsty mattress
And the skin of the moon.
Oily. Faltering.
There is a tenderness that lights
Along my nerves
And flickers among the lists,
Casting shadows over every ounce
Of time that wallows, wheyish,
To curdle in my mouth.

Citrus

Line me up like grapefruit peels on the rim of a bathtub.
Pink acid seeping lazy into your gaping pores,
Sink one bitten thumb into the rind and taste the split,
Hear the tear. I want my flesh to tug away in tiny cotton threads
That stick to your palms and dry hard.

There will always be numbers. Let me sour a little on your tongue,
Get caught between your teeth. I want to linger on your fingers,
Acidic, distasteful. I'll slide unnoticed in molecules down into the water
That marinates you, dribble down your chin to pool in the juicy basin
Of your bellybutton. My seeds will forever come as shocks.

Line me up like grapefruit peels on the rim of a bathtub.
To teeter, to curl in on myself, to gently mold.

Listen

If you wake up too early, listen for it.
The quiet constant thuds squeezing in your ears.
The humming peace beneath the skin of bath water.
Listen for the pieces of sheets that stayed cool.

If you wake up too early, listen for the bleaching light.
There is a weight in your bones.
Your blood a sluggish pudding, nestling them,
Listen for the stillness in your bones.

Listen for it, if you wake up. The sound of air.
The absences that pillow you. Listen to the grey ebb,
The heft of space against your skull.