Rain fell; a thousand taunting fingers
Unknotting tortoise-dead hemp meant to bind
Our hovel to those acne-pocked, mooring
Ideals we called home and family.

Smell the saccharine skies, you sang,
Draping my caustic heart with slivered sequins.
Seismographic sheets measured our love,
Sensed chasms yet to be charted.

Wine sank into a ravenous belly,
Fermenting over-ripe skin, useless cells.
My heart, placed in cold storage,
Awaited your resurrection.

Spinning, dizzy stars wove nebulae from absent planet-dreams.
Jupiter, the rising house of fate, bled it’s crimson gas overhead,
Tainting an already dim future with a noxious perfume.
You read the news of the day with the voice of flies
Splattered upon death’s windscreen.

Whispering ghosts stole secrets from plaster walls, while you slept
With him in my bed, in my apartment, while I drooled
The once brilliant mind of a fool onto couch pillows.
Beer and bullshit, fed to me as worship, tasted sacrilegious.
Offerings towards another false idol.

You called winter snow like a whore to your motel room,
Yet the frost slept with me as its lover that night.

And still, you are so smug with your spotted owls and blue whales
Surrounding you like padded prison walls.

A grey city slid off my plate like so much muck down the sewer.
Mindless masses followed; their duty to ideology a welcome yoke
Surrounding their syphilis diseased necks.
Religion holds so few virtues.
Broken bones rattled, the forgotten man bled to death,
His skin too mottled by prejudice to be seen clearly.

And there was a man who poisoned dogs when I was thirteen
And in love with myself for the first time.
He taught a lesson too harsh to be taken lightly, or forgotten:
Everything, even love, is only temporal, corpeal.

Then came the bluest of children, waving his wrinkled fingers
As he sailed his first boat through the channeled canal.
My son, flushed down the toilet, too young to leave his mother.
His name was Benjamin, the name the stars sing nightly
Before becoming engulfed by angry fists of bloody-faced zealots.

The train from leipzig to prague rolled easily, as a clackety brit
Who told her life’s story to anyone who would listen rattled on.

I later sold her tale for a million dollars, dying a pauper.

But, as I rode the bare-backed hours home to my mother country
My tongue deserted its post, unable to interpret its native language.
Days and nights of several uncalendared months passed seamlessly
As I wandered the barren streets, two blocks from home,
Without ever recognizing your face.

The rain washed mud from my nails, blood from my eyes,
Carving its acid signature into the river of soft asphalt:
Your street.
My street.
Brick and cobblestone, desperate as wolves at my doorstep,
Reminding me: this frequent landscape was a place once called home.