Little nooses of rain extend downward
in black runnels from the char-cheeks
of death's head pillows that scrape
off the humid rust from a mid-afternoon.
Throw open the windows, let the dark
steam that climbs from the lawn clippings
approach the nose like an awkward dog,
until it clings in the back of the throat,
to be washed down with raw scotch.

The rough breeze dies in the shaking green
berries that dot the holly dome,
the rain stops in the street, chastened,
& fat clouds grease on westward;
she's not here and she won't be again -
her cast-offs lie in shallow oubliettes,
in shadow-bottoms of torn paper boxes -
but this new-shirt weather speaks her name
in the Braille-pecks of new, blue sky.

The new stars
keep roving
& the roads rill out
down the hills -
I am so lucky
that you smiled
at my wayward
life, let me
open your grace
with a strum
of my fingers.
I loved you first,
and best - just ask
the wild nets
of new stars -
they'll tell you
everything.

This breeze would scarcely stir a wasp-wing;
how will it ever bear away the coming rain
massing in loose cuffs over the flat-faced slate?
It won't. The rain will squat here in the gray
like Baba Yaga's hut. My eye drowns
in the soft drift of the water petals.
There is a single white cloud, doubled
in the black water of the road. It doesn't move,
as if paralyzed. There is no joy in this place,
only this numb wisp that hangs
like a poorly glued ornament:
a quick wheeze, a gasp, a cigarette breath,
a wracked cough, a corpse-smear.

The moon wears a dull brown gown,
& the stars seem braced up there,
a few tired Christmas bulbs
pinned to a threadbare pine.

Dublin is just as far tonight
as it ever was,
& again I'll sleep alone
in an alien city

where fleets of black-bellied cars
crawl among the funerals,
over the fur of the earth
roughed and matted with rain.

In this last push before sleep
I'll choose instead to remember
your susurrating hair,
fanned across the pillow.

I have
this
daydream
where
you are
drawing,
writing,
and I'm
composing
another
nocturne,
and the
nail of
sun
falls
& falls.

O,
your
talents...!
I sing
of them,
in this
lyric
and its
brothers
& sisters.

They are
gifts
that
wing
through
the alchemy
of your
blood.

I feel it,
too,
when the
music
must be
thrown
from my
fingers
or die
of rust.

I feel it
when
poems
climb
from the
garden
behind
my eyes.

I feel it
in you.
Darling,
draw for me,
draw for me.

A woman on the walk
chews on a white gap
that hovers in the tree.

A fleet of dead clouds,
dull gummy bumps,
reflect our hunched signals.

Even the road is false,
a mouth of crushed oil husks
that eats our fried blood.

This all collects into an afternoon
of chemical mistakes.
Thoughts that spongily refold.

We're reading with flashlights
under a shared blanket of grief,
eyes shining; incandescent wax.

Ochre chaperones
watch stolidly
as I bawl
into floorboards.
But I hold on
to my hopes -  
"best vibes forever,"
I promised that,
& I'll keep it.
Amber eye
on the pole,
please don't tell on me,
let me sink to
the laminate tonight,
choking on name.

Bootleg ***** in America has gone by many nicknames, from Blue Ruin, Moonshine, Mountain Dew, Coffin Varnish, Old Be Joyful, White Lightning, Rotgut, Popskull...


Queens and fathers, merchants and poets -
all seek appointments with Dr. Popskull,

when these days brim with fresh anxieties
that won't stop piling atop last nerves;

when sunrises now sizzle, haywire,
bringing bills and bad news, too soon by half;

even the weeks and months are mouthy,
won't shut up with their stubborn griefs.

Blue ruin brewing in the clawfoot tub -  
Old Be Joyful swigged sweet tot by tot -

bay *** blind in the corner store -  
Dr. Popskull fills prescriptions as fast

as dollars. Evening varnish vanishes -
happiness is borrowed from a future self.

You came
from verdant Dublin
by word and by mouth.

Ancient sorceries
dealt the evenings
like playing cards.

Paintings stammered
strange truths from the walls
of the marbled gallery:

Yes: you travel with and without.
So walk slowly, dear,
in the cold rain of May.

Little magpie,
don't leave bed -
stay the day instead.
I have coffee, bread -
we'll be fed -
but that thigh
must elude this eye
or I lose the thread.
Did I hear you sigh?
Little magpie,
don't leave bed.

Please, please, please
come down on our side.
I'll ditch this clovering snow,
& go anywhere with you.
Either way, our parade
will keep moving
down Main St.
I'm dying to tell you this,
but you're so far from me,
slipped into the black squares
of distance you requested.
I packed your things because
I couldn't take the museum:
your cherry lover's dress,
your little coffee mugs,
your Aleppo pepper.
Then I unpacked the pepper.
I love you without condition,
little tiramisu.
But I can't make you feel
the same way
without your help.  
Please come down
on our side, honey.
In our ship, right now
you are the captain
with the wheel in your hand.
I am the lookout -
I think I see land,
but there might be rocks.

Strange thought before a surgery:
we're all guests signed in to visit  

at a nursing home for the gods -
we make our obeisance and tell them

of our doings and goings,
but they're feeble-minded, rheumy,

ensconced in cloudy rockers,
not watching or listening, perhaps

they reminisce on discarded cosmos;
we're forgotten, or, worse,

acknowledged but irrelevant -
either way they'll share no wise.

I feel only silence without and within
as I lie down on the paper bed -

casual as ice, the doctor carves
away the excess swim from my *****,

by needle, knife, and fire -  
his third on a humdrum Friday.

I gaze through ache at pock-faced ceiling -
it gazes back with dead fluorescence.

I sneak a look at a lustrous dwarf star
that caught me in its shining net

like an uncommonly nonchalant fish.
I limp to the car, up the stairs,

befriend the bottles of null,
the pocketless black: the new me.

Deoch Chas-ruisgte - the third drink of the day, taken while still barefoot

Face to face with soap-fingered morning,
an abyss bounded by vapor trails,
an unblinking eye stares back from the glass.

Once, I woke with a lover in this bed,
her hands braced against my back,
as if keeping me from falling.

Now the daylight is my chilly crutch,
a mocking rain-ring sliding over
the madhouse orange of the turning trees.

When I was a child, I was left to my own devices;
you'd think solitude wouldn't poison me this way -
yet even the afternoon breeze shaves me down.

The little cat and the sunbeam
do their daily pas de deux
while I think about the blood-flower

that emerged from an angel's mouth.
A year of snow-tides, of shipwrecks...
Oh, god...

Fat flat building with slick shark skin
I've found myself under you again -

remember how I first strutted heedless
into your faux-stone lobby, head full

of myself? And how I left an hour later
with cold water where my heart was,

bolting from your thin-throated halls
to blow off work the rest of the day -

I toured the liquor ruins, saw a movie
in a shared oubliette as salt draped

over raked velvet, strolled a park
packed with straying rose slips,

heels hushed and stuck to diary pages,
unknown castles falling within me.

Black-hided commercial mid-rise,
your windows eat the morning sun

but you're powerless now: I walk
through the freeze of your face.

Tomorrow the air
brights with
spark shapes
as sky fumes.

Beneath the
fire point pattern
my mind will be
elsewhere, pooling

across highways to the
airport where she'll
step from the plane
the day after.

Once the thousands
have decamped
from the green basins,
I will reclaim

the soft galleons
of lawn with her,
the grand marble
systems, rectangle

lullabies, and gallery
gardens, a new life.
And I'll tell her
about how I watched

all the new lush stars
that lived syllables
before collapsing
into pops of ash.

Dead men are heavier than broken hearts. -Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep


Birds in flock are tilting
in the pink gloam,

a black convex wine stain
pouring from the last orange faces

of exhausted trees, flayed
by the new freeze.

My oldest friend smokes menthols
in the driveway, discussing

the crushing vicissitudes
of the women we have loved,

until voices thicken
into mint-smoke plumes.

Night is a coarse dough
come November:

knotted, knitted, clay-skinned.
These gaps between us all

are so lonesome. You expect
the silence to eventually contract,

but it doesn't; it won't.
Birds are slanting so heavily,

as if they are drunk.
"Dead men are heavier

than broken hearts."
They slip away, so that

the only sound is wind,
crawling up the hillside.

The stair-shadow bar
a blackwood twist that swims
& recurves under elbow and pint.

Eyes knock in the false, exacted twilight,
against the yarded backdrop
of felt puddles stroked with chalk.

Here is a glass of rye - it waits
in amber for the pink warm wash
of my prowling, kissing palm;

here is a glass of Powers - the sweet
scent flowers the stale angles,
fumes away beyond the lip line.

Things can't quite be read -
what does the canted shoulder mean
when it turns my way?

Words tumble into the chrome-crumbled
struts of the barstools. A kölsh floats into me,
then two, small columns of silted yellow.

On leaving, I am amazed to find
the cheer-charred night, rude gestures
of moon sweeping the towers,

& a fearful silence that finds its harbor
deep inside the glen of my ribcage:
a barking heart, chained to its house.

Well, here I am, without her -
in this new dark space
where I'm slowly breathing.
I pour another drink in the dark -

a few tremulous stars
encrust the subfusc city mantle,
& a bus growls off
down a flat hallway of road.

The floor is paved with books -
the cat sleeps under a half-moon
that's curled like a rotted aloe leaf.
How are things in Dublin, I wonder?

The night pools in the air,
above the sighing branch.
The kitchen is smaller here.
Grief leaks into the tight hours.

I see a bathroom light snap on
across the street. Birds clap across
the row. A car races down the rack,
& one more minute stutters away.

A cloud is grimly passing,
                  passing grimly
o'er this raven cawing glibly,
mocking us with twilit eye.

In this hellish ev'ning hour
you clean the garage, clean and scour,
finding tomes both low and high.

But now you leave to do a chore,
forego the raven at your door,
who blithely chants his "nevermore,"
his soft ironic "less is more,"

the darkling chant in falling dusk.
The ice around the heart's not thawing
shadows form claw, fang, and tusk
from the raven's stony cawing,

and in the late and lonely hour,
lonely, late, and dimly dour,
a chill that passes cold and sour,
tells of ebon raven waiting,
a raven perched and blankly weighting

my soul against a feather,
now, and then forevermore:
a rainy hour's graven weather,
this black bird with his dread languor
whispers ceaseless: "nevermore."

Here in the waiting room
it's beige and safe.
Nothing like the room
where I'll divide my trauma
into lean little cutlets.

When I can't take it anymore,
I'll watch the fish
living in the doctor's tank,
thoughtlessly ******* down
bright quivers
of lamp stripes.

In high school
I met you,
you belonged
to my sister's circle

to the fresh night
to the scent of a book
open golden spine
in a vanishing

bookstore.
These impressions
of you were right:
You told me later

of your pride
in breaking
into the play
despite the crossed

arms of the drama
clique, scorning
you, jealous.
& you started

a coffee shop
to fill the gap
& cure the smallness
of a small town

that struggled
to hold you.
You were one
of those I knew

would be leaving
soon. Too clever
by half,
already in the world,

already aching,
a blind seed
in a paper garden.
You got punched

in the gut
by the burned out
girl, initiating you
into something

nameless.
Sliding out
of the house
after hours

to see the boy
under moon -
No, to see
the black days band

& float above
all the hands,
some touch you
as a woman,

& it was in this
awareness
that I met you
in the land

of dust jackets.
My curiosity
was sharp
as a wasp's song:

you were
a walking yes;
you told me
about Anna's

bonfire flicking
your face
as you cross
the quiet fields

littered with love
& you wrapped
in sky until
the girls went hunting.

How you pierced
yourself at
that festival but
I suspect

you pierced yourself
in others ways too -
you were so aware,
looking

for affirmation
for connection,
even with the teal
pager you kept

in pocket and
would then
plug in your
secret phone

just for the call.
You challenged
it all,
rebel

determined
to be yourself,
acute push
against the bonds

of salted adolescence
of a Persian family
of being a woman

in a world
that tried to
fold that
against you.

You told me
all of this.
I met you then
and never

quite let go
even in the years
that moved
like free water

between us.
You came back
& my old
school thoughts

drifted out
of my mouth.
You gave me
memories

that I engrave
here. This is
all you.
It's you.

Oh, little sweet one -
you found me early, and held on tight.

Hundreds of photos prove in chorus
the joy you took in living.

You would climb to my shoulder,
like a honey-brooch, and perch -

gazing green-eyed out the long pane
at the small traffic below, the playthings

of your curious thought. I cannot bear
to give away your beige tree

so frayed and leafed with hair.
I cannot bear to gaze at the rug

where you delighted in long quiet hours
of happy sleep, dreaming of running,

legs twitching. Your love of tuna,
& endless inquiries into the open freezer door

charmed me anew each morning. Your purr
gathered in little hums and circles in my hands.

We both hated our many moves,
but you always found the best parts

of our new homes so quickly -
the bat-squeaks on the school roof,

or the mourning doves beyond the screen.
I miss the scrape scrape scrape of your foot

in the litter. I miss the little splashes
you made in the water bowl.

I miss you very much, little one;
you were the best part of me.

The rain stops time tonight -
it halts in icy webs on glass.

All my friends have ditched;
I sit alone in a ***** tower,

the others look with pity
as I sip this cloudy beer.

I think about poetry:
a hundred years ago

I might have survived,
carried by some fortune,

but now I stare at the moon
hungrily, gently starving,

slavering for metaphor, but
nothing comes, nothing comes.

Rain freezes on the step.
The moon devours us;

my mind is a dead machine,
full of ice and grief and rust.

O sweet friend:
I'm glad for you.
May days never end,
O sweet friend,
but always extend
with verse's glue.
O sweet friend:
I'm glad for you.

Neruda
my father,
Plath
my mother -
watch how
their child
eats the
raw
peach
fingers
of dawn
with
teeth
sharp
as poems.

Within
me, a
tower of
patience,
where
I stand
calm as
barefoot
trees.

It rains,
drops
fat as
cherry
stones,
as I
nestle
my stripe
against
my throat
in my
good
black
shoes,
aching
circles
of smiles
on my
cheeks.

Darling,
come hide
in my
heart
& peek
at the
soft
world
when
you are
ready.

There is
room for
both of
us in
here to
watch
the
accordion
of my
ribs
play
Astor
on loop
until the
cherry
rain
dies in
the branch
of sky,
revealing
the playing
card of
morning.

Occasionally
I will
pack a
suitcase
of language
and flee
to your
heart,
hiding
behind
the petals
of history
and art.
I know
I will
be safe
from
the shackles
of the
glacial
darkness.

Neruda
my father,
Plath
my mother -
I'm patient
& inevitable.
Love,
forgive
my queries
& take my
nine lives.

We have
claimed
the sun.
Come,
let us
steal the
moon, too.

Chest packed
with fearful
breath.
Sun wash
the bright
piece low.
Don't move
farther,
stay here
by my blue
posting.
Answers
flock and
scatter.
A handful
of lilies,
the knot
that cruels
in the throat.
Come and
claim me -
isn't it clear
that I just  
want you?

K----,

You are fresh milk
& I am lemon pulp.

My acid smile pools
on my face, pink curdled shadow

aimed at your corner.
You are so young:

you mock the silver sway
that drips down my cheeks.

You are draped in yourself,
but I don't really mind,

because you're clever. Inside you
I think there's something tender;

but it's not for me to uncover.
I'll sit in the angle,

the beer cranny, and glance
your way with eyes full of sugar.

The night dies waltzing
on yellow lemon heels;

the day is born in a flicker
of snide cream cloud.

Our thoughts float with gin,
and a little beer.
O darling, let's begin -
our thoughts float with gin,
and soon we're grin to grin
& the night floods with cheer.
Our thoughts float with gin,
and a little beer.

Thoughts like fire,
all about you.
Wilding desire,
thoughts like fire
devouring a pyre
to love unsubdued -
thoughts like fire,
all about you.

Green rapture of human life,
crazy hope, golden frenzy,
intricate unsleeping dream,
like dreams of vain treasure.

Soul of the world, demented lushness,
decrepit imaginary greenery,
the today of joyful expectations
and the unfortunate tomorrows.

Follow your shadow in search of your day,
those who with green glasses for cravings
see everything painted to their desire.

More cautious of my fortune,
I have both eyes, both hands,
and only see what I can touch.

There is a
bent blue hill,
a green pool,
a bleached heart.

Remember when
we saw Lucy,
in the checkered
room, that drowsy
drunk woman
leaning against
my back, singing
every word?

There is a
red elm blaze,
a white tooth,
a bleached heart.

Can't you feel
I'm trying to say it?
Look, I know
words are not
my bridges.
I feel them perish
between us.
Can't you see it
on my face?

There is a
gray brick crumble,
a yellow deadlight,
a bleached heart.

I once knew a man in a chair
made of cracked maroon hide,

he was wreathed by reefs of smoke
rooted in pipe-glow, and he told me

how youth was all maybes: maybe
I'd pan for gold in a cold course,

maybe love would drape me flashing
in slices like Christmas tinsel, or

maybe I'd **** someone who stumbled
into the road under pitiless wheels.

It's all just a handful of maybes,
held loose, dealt at random

as our paths divide, divide again,
divide into myriad matrices

of still further divisions: because
we're plural, we're entire armies

of fortune, and we fill cemeteries
with our regrets. Strange-faced

angels are also our oldest devils,
& anything can happen to anyone.

Until, said my friend with the pipe,
you reach a certain point in life

when maybe thickens to never.
When sourdough hearts know

that division is over, and it's entropy
steering our dwindling gambles,

when the lacunae are closer, more real
than memories of any yesterday.

A crust of wax
affixed with
breath hovers
near the window.

Doctors retreat
oh-so-quietly,
afraid to break
the soft blood
of this moment.

The hospital
sheets are so
impossibly thin,
like wafers,
& they shine
as a fluorescence
wanders through
the five of us.

My father
slowly assumes
the translucence
of memory.

I know it's over by
the stillness of his hand.

Love, please tell me
where to cast my life -  

The ivoried downtown
and sleeted piers

of Washington,
where the Potomac

sleeps itself blue,
& the rows of museums

pull coffee teeth
in a closed afternoon?

Or the northside quay
& green garden walls

of Dublin, where I walked
in your hand, eyes to brim,

out to Phoenix Park
to search for the fallow deer,

but finding instead
only a debris of wind?

I'm owned by neither:
I wake each day

into a dead space
without color or shape,

only these memories -
do you remember

leaving yoga on
Connecticut Avenue,

the petrichor winding
out the night's full flower,

the nuzzling shine
of the walk?

I don't care
where it happens,

but that's what I want,
every day,

those steps home with you;
every ******* day.

We held hands
as we approached it,
the pink, black,
orange monument.
We stood as if we expected
something from it,
but it failed us,
an indifferent oracle.
Your hand slipped from mine
as you stepped closer,
for a second you were
inside it, eaten whole
by its hide glue mouth,
before you drifted
in diagonals
to other colors.

I am wayward,
have always been.
Yet I'm one sleep
away from you,

& I'm still:
still as the night leaf,
still as the larch post.
still as the new moon.

Here is the pool
of evening,
come to take this
waiting from me.

I am wayward,
have always been -
but for you, lovely one,
I am patient as saints.

One lifetime is not enough for our love.
But in the days given to us,
we will feast on the sun and moon,
with a dessert of soft snow.

One lifetime is not enough for our love,
but we will be man and woman together
like in your favorite books -
to the very last curling page.

Aşkımız için bir ömür yeterli değil.
Ama bize verilen günlerde
Güneşte ve ayda ziyafet çekeceğiz
yumuşak kar tatlısı ile.

Aşkımız için bir ömür yeterli değil
ama birlikte erkek ve kadın olacağız
favori kitaplarınızdaki gibi -
en son kıvrılma sayfasına.

Blue-bruise gore slips
down the slick mirror face
of the lithe knife that skips
between the ribs - I've looked
at our old photos again.
Rotting ash knots choke the slow
red rhythm of the blood.

A bird dies against the window pane,
just a small thump in rain.

A ghost-head cinder
leaps from a white stalk
thrown to the gritted curb -
the moon is a wrecking ball.

It's a night to fold away
my thoughts like old sheets.
I let my submerged face swim
like a black-scaled fish in my glass,
before raising it to my lip slash.

The roof tiles peel away.
Bellies of shadow perish
in the autumnal cascade.

This grief settles in the grave-gully
of the pillow. Crooked queasy dreams
rise like foxglove from the sheets.
A thick paste fills my mouth: sleep.

Fleeing line cross-wave,
lateen sail's white-flash,
buckling up the race-wind:
caravel out on the blue-green,
making every speed-point
under the gray coast-cloud -

You,
     on your way to me.

I'm just sitting here,
thoughts sieving through the pane
in little tarry slices, sluicing slurs
or slurries against a night
of Georgian house-faces crowding
their brick-point cheeks
eastward towards a flat disc
of frost, cut with black wings.

The storm glass has birthed
a wicked ammonia flake
from the quartzy ethanol thigh,
which I guess means rain
will break in soon to blotch
& pock the walk, breeding
petrichor into the wine-dark
water-heart of sinking air.

I make rough gestures
towards civility and society,
keep the words floating above
the sutured margins of the wound;
wouldn't want to alarm anybody.
There is no rescuing sleep tonight,
only this scrying glass clotting up
with starburst funeral wreathes.

The heater lopes
behind me, so
I don't hear you
rugging your way
up the stairs
with your gun.

When you point
it towards me,
the lights switched
on yesterday.

Be with me, love,
tomorrow's our day.
Like hand in glove
be with me, love.
My little dove,
my lily bouquet -
be with me, love,
tomorrow's our day

It fell below
freezing today.
They say it might snow.

My morning is slow,
I saw sun's only ray
as it fell below

the black blow
of cloud's spray;
it might snow,

a flaking flow
gray on gray,
bringing me low,

as though
it knows you're away.
They say it might snow

like crumbles of dough
dropping my way;
sinking, falling below; 
it might snow.

The birds are rioting - dispelled
in a shudder from the arm
of the fog-headed elm that splays
towards fresh pins of frost,
wind spoons them down to grass.
O little birds, I too am pulled -
a branching ardor folds and flays
my days to nights. Her easy charm
spills across me and I'm as lost
as the brittle leaf-eye that last
breaks from the tree into new winter...
The birds fork to ledge or hedge
as I walk on - my unruly center
tamed and shaped to urgent pledge.

[...] a recurring wave
Of arrival. The soul establishes itself.
But how far can it swim out through the eyes.
-John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror


Greasy brown sun smeared over hill,
buttering palm trees, melting in bay.

The Pacific shuffles cold and blue,
Spanish roof is red tooth grin,

irregular and hungry. Day clatter,
hurly burly in the sand pine,

& I'm phasing out, a laugh
lost in sway grass.

Conversations carry late
with new old cousins.

My mind rattles and clots,
needs ballast. Shush. Shush:

fog rises from the sea,
it never stops arriving.

Watch the wild swans
that glide the pool.
In the blooming dawn
watch the wild swans
spread wing until gone -
A white thread unspools.
Watch the wild swans
that glide the pool.

I was fifteen
in a birthday
room for Alan.
Lamps out,
air thick
with the flick
& sag of
a movie.
My slick hand
taken by the girl
on the floor.
White noise burst
in my mouth.
My heart
crawled
down the stairs.
The lamps
puffed on
and she slipped
my hand.
Each cone and
rod in her
green eyes
glistened,
adolescent.

I saw her again
at a house party
when I was
twenty-three.
Drunk on
Haitian ***,
carving out
a blood rhythm
under
a canopy
of memory.
Her lips shined
in memorial
to what teenagers
had been, once.

Later, I threw up
the *** into
the bushes
below the kitchen
window and I heard
her turn
off the faucet with
an indifferent laugh.

This is my left hand in the mirror,
twinned and pinned to the glass,
hanging in the black valley while a song
rips me along the old perforations,
& the whole moment splits -
the light wavers over the mantle,
a ball of ghost, a past thing,
memories sold away in ingots.

This sordid exorcism hinges
on night pictures that I can't shake:
a backward lens, a frozen belt-step,
a long lawn with green marrow.
No, that dream is just watery pulp,
like when you squeeze a plum too hard
& the juice sticks and stains
in the white noise web of your fingers.

We look for solutions to this problem...
in the cloud rush, in the oven gas.

I found a medicine that I drink,
it clears the night wreathes away.

Duran Duran's "The Chauffeur" plays
while the rain stomps in the black road.

That was us.... we were then,
among the cobbles and tombs,

hand in hand, absinthe and sugar
searing the air. We were; we were.

You held my thigh at night,
a bone against the insomnia.

The dark didn't come until later;
it had such a broad wing.

The hours grew late. The purple vine
clawed upward. The walls crawled with taste...

I lost my hold on things. Do you remember
how we watched the old Dean Martin

movie on TV in Rome? I drank beer
from a can while you laughed.

You laughed - it was the sweet middle
that sustained the world.

Now... now... the hour is long in the tooth.
My chest is a grave. There is nothing after this.

No, nothing - I'm sorry.
Dig this earth for no purpose, friend...

My ash collects around the fingertips,
waiting for the grand canal.

The art of
blacking
the teeth -

The kettled
smile, coalish,
wet with steam.

The lacquer's
taste, like the
spaces between
the night grass.

The beauty of
the dyed mouth,
& the kisses that
reach from the
bottom of black
envelopes of sea