There are women who inspire the need to master and enjoy them;
but she kindles the desire to die slowly, with her watching.
Charles Baudelaire, “The Urge to Paint,” Paris Spleen
In a month of Mondays
Weather-beaten, like Glaucus of the sea
Kneeling in the back pew
Head in hands
In unyielding seriousness
Cobwebbed by the old words
This you appeared
Singing the Vespers psalm
That made me fall out of love
Again
the miracle of empty hands:
giving what you do not have
O lamb of God
You could sing the phone book
But what you gave to God
Was stolen from me
(lower-case man)
Afterwards we entered the raw afternoon
Strange and out of place
In the teeming fog-wreathed
Sexuality of the streets
Separated by millimetres, not miles
Playing heads or tails with your existence
Your dog-eyes fixed to the stars
Your stumbling bound to have
too many consequences
Like mimosa pudica
Folding at first touch
In the midday of life
You confess
You hear the silence
The gods whisper in your ear
Your made-up relationships
No different from mine
Wound tight
With insatiable desires
Pace is the trick, O Rachel,
you never mastered
I miss you I miss you
talitha cum!
O Rach-el O Rach-el
You confess
They keep telling you to get a life
But we’d rather be dead, we said
Than have “a life”
Life anyway wasn’t meant to be lived
It was meant to be written
And you were smitten
By dark ecologies
Under the shattered moon
Where night undoes day
But no-one dies
because no-one lives
Zero summer
We would see sun
think shadow
Delirious and demented
Thoughts degraded into feelings
Soul sodden
Crotch charged
Used-up words
And die-away whispers
Fusing and confusing
With all our fuckery
Bathed in your sweat, in my regret
And a nameless be-longing
The original sin against you:
“Don’t give me roses,
Because roses always die”
But you took the lies
Like a frog swallowing flies
Frightened to read your eyes
Our days now done
Our altars smoke no more
Your last words
From a mouth full of ashes:
“Keep the memories,
I don’t want them”
The cold steel truths of life
And your telephone reaction
Like a blow to the back of the head.
Absentmindedly
In blood-smeared lips
Every morning
You brew coffee
For two.