Wear

His nakedness hangs on a hook on the wall.
When it catches on to his gaze, he bows to it.
His nakedness turns its face from him.
It remains.
He wears his brokenness, his fallenness, his not-yet-worldliness.
He wears himself like a ruse; like a vanguard.
When one errs it threads itself in to your world-weariness.
He wants only to be warmed.
Yet eventually each erring becomes worn too.
Faces and places are tried on.
He tried on history then shrugged it off.
But then the livery of a new day does not do- he is boxed in, all angles, all grooves.
His nakedness lives on the hook on the wall, as he welcomes the weekend, in a beast’s rugged fur.
He clutches on to the dimming of the day like rosary beads, as the night sky turns her face to those remaining.
He welcomes her: the sooty, speckled livery as a cloak, now thrown to the dirt, now wrested from it’s caresses with the eternal.
He peels his papers from the pack like layers of his own skin and ashes as an offering to the air.
He drinks his bourbon straight.
Swallows it like the words of a lover who will one day leave.
He makes love in the dark because he knows faces aren’t supposed to have names, then takes breakfast stale and tea cold.
This is a pseudo-skin he wears too.
And when the sky is yellowed, ripened, bruised, he wears that too.
Then Monday comes.
It is a crowning ceremony.
A king he is made, where knees wear the earth.
He reminisces, having made mistresses of Sunday skies.
His eyes meet with his nakedness in the evening, where it remains with a ghastly perfection.

Burgeoning

Over-ripe with life, his
burgeoning heart
sought out
things and places in which to store

pieces of himself. It was
too much to live with the
living inside
himself. In the

elegy of living, he came to
know his
heart as some sort of
monstrous, self-

propelling machine. It
pinned him against the
wall at night and in the morning he
forgot that he could

speak. He
heard
only his heart’s
racket and the seal of

madness was stabbed in to his
flesh. It was a
comfort to
bleed out, even a
little.

Once he found a
girl to love and
things were even
worse. The

machine wore him and
he was
monstrous; a
living bruise.

Changeling

Selves replaced each other as
changelings, each mimicking
ruinations.

The kind of charming anxiety beholden in
youth can grow stale and unpalatable by its
mere perpetual presence. She had been a

catastrophe;
a thousand
emancipations; the thing to

arrest his blood. Now
written on every inch of his
body was a Thomas poem

ached in to existence and she could read him from
every angle. This was the problem. He began to
think of her as he thought of

death:
as a revelation that existed
everywhere but in the present. She

endured
as a spot at the back of his
neck that could bring on the

presence of specters or the place
in him that only
wanted for sex.

Despite himself, new moments
always
bled in to being and to

proceed was to
violate the hallowed that he
carried, as refined as a pearl and swallowed as

deep as the seabed. Life became
pure violation. Of course,
there are truths:

that things were often ok;
fine, even; that there
exist a multiplicity of

inviolate things. But
then there were the moments that got
stuck in his throat

forever and time kept
emptying him.

Lovers’ Skin

There are boys who carry briefcases
bound up with the grimaces of
cuckolded old men. There are suitcases
hung beneath eyes that are the preface of
absolution that never comes and the
assemblage of niceties that are labelled as truths.
There are lovers made up entirely of
advertising slogans who know more about love that you ever
will and thoughts that present themselves as
revolutionaries, then turn out to be
bureaucrats. There are words skipped across
afternoons like stones and then
discarded. There are accidental glances, favours and other
transgressions that are written neon in the night of the soul.
There are the fashions of the body that make anklebones and
collarbones superfluous.
There is the conceit of being well.
There are heavy bodies.
There is what remains.

Religion

I measure the cross with the length of your arms.
The falter; the fall; the resurrection are not
gifts for the pious, but remedies
for the mistaken; for the too well.

My hope is drowsy.
My will is unwell.

The solace of mornings has been
spent; the refrain of bodies, bruised.

The ocean wants me to forget her.
She wants me to remember my
name; the scratches on my wrists; the ancient
exemplars of finitude.

But I am a walking calamity.
My prayer-bed knees creak.

I ask too much of the sky and too little of my mother.
I bottle my blood and throw it to the sea.

I laugh and turn plentitude in to
despair. I slit your wrists so that I can
wear your hair like the
earth wears a spring morning.

You are breaking, my darling.
Still, I snuff out the stars like dust.

Skin

My darling;
made of my skin.

You
wake in my tremble.

I shepherd my
thoughts as a vocation.

Errant, vagabond
words fall in and

out of themselves.
Homeless openness

becomes itself, and
we become that

capacity to
be the lack that is in us all.

Our poor,
wretched hands. Our

unmasterable feet. Our greedy thoughts.

That the most
craven parts of my soul

would approve
of gentle evenings. But I know not

of the
idylls of the mind.

Anyway, the pretty is an
impenetrable sham.

This blistering. This blistering.
This blistering now.

Being is entirely deniable.
Stitch up my spine

with your swelling,
warm unrestfulness.

Rest my mind on the
knife-blade

of your
wretchedness.

Body Electric

The invention of man: written on bodies;

etched in to skin. The bones of winter are

beginning to form their walls.
You and I are the same;

made

of hope and skin.
Smokes taken to castigate

time and gods on tv screens.
Skies torn from the book of all that lies above

to be tread on by hopes far too small.
How quickly the soul

becomes drunk on purposelessness

This body, electric.
Clutching for anything, bodies

bleed in to each other.
Claiming truths or things people say;

arresting whatever is close by.
The full openness

dwells within and space pours out of crowds.
Sometimes we serve the gods, when the

face of the earth has been torn down.