For rest—
I see your soul, Wanderer.
A young you who yearned for eternal life with
another, seeking that other to feast on the forbidden
fruit of Cupid’s labor—the silver arrow’s
anodyne injection leaving a dumb, drunk love.
All for what?
Wide awake on that first one’s chest feeling the
press of a rib against your neck the quiet but
felt breaths and your words made them lurch
and say, “Don’t look at me that way.”
I've heard your thoughts, Drifter.
An angel-headed hipster who burned for that
ancient heavenly anesthetic to numb the ache of
a world undone, to be one with the naked
universe and expect it all to beckon to you.
And you knew.
The moment right as that pierced starry-armed
stranger looked at your eyes, yours like big
pictures, plump pupils giving it all away,
and they say, “Don’t look at me that way.”
I tracked you here, Settler.
The red dwarf remnants of some stellar dynamo
mourning a sun’s faded rays that traveled years
to tell you that it is and has been done, and you:
seeking red-hot pokers only to discover smoke.
And you choke.
Dying in that one-bedroom-one-bath jail cell on
the tail-end of Fitzroy Road suffocating, wondering
about that distant missed nova and only asking about
the bills to pay, and he’ll say, “Don’t look at me that way.”
Here you rest, Specter,
watching star charts catch the Polaris
seeing others find their way forward
and all’s left is us, lost at sea as we
wither from our little suicides.
But we survive.
And as twilight floods our lush souls
chasing worlds beyond the known
too often I have peered into your own
seeing you forsaken and alone.
—I think of our home,
where we danced like ice skaters through the night
sharing a cigarette on an air-mattress beneath porchlight
and while you’ve never fled the corner of my sight
the sun rays claim I’ve felt the last of you tonight—
So all I can afford to say:
I've felt the final tug from you today.