Loverly

you’re leaned over the kitchen sink

copper and cowboy-mouthed 

windows braiding flaxen light across your shoulders

grocery list curled on the counter

i’ve never seen your handwriting before: 

wide, sharp, intimate 

perfect pining thing, handsome tomcat 

sighing into the lazy onslaught of morn

i peer in the deep of your eyes

combing back downy tangles 

twisted around your ears

old enough to buy a shotgun

but not cut your own hair 

you smile your small-toothed smile

leaking water / words down 

your father’s shirt (hate him 

but still wear his clothes)

hands dipped over hipbones

permanent as death:

this is the time where love isn’t 

original, isn’t spectacular

but it’s ours, domestic and mewling

there isn’t a world where i don’t love you

i’ve memorized the ticking of your pulse

waffled against the couch

dreaming of                the cosmos warped inward with heat

kafka’s letters to milena

milky horses spoiled gray

bleeding stampedes on the horizon 

surely you’d hate someone who

wishes the world’s end in

order to wholly give their heart

bury your arms around my

waist as the skyline bloodshots

sedate me, diagnose me

murmur that our lungs 

are slick with arsenic 

that the salt under your

skin is shifting in tides

that my indecision turns you on

by two weeks your touch is foreign 

lost in the glittering body of night

i’ll forget the sweat on your upper lip

face pressed against the collar of your coat

turpentine, rosy

oh, if you could see me now

the smear of gravel across a martyr’s brow

open-fielded and gaping

broken pupils spilling onto concrete

some corpse spat on the side of the road

with no-thing and every-thing attached to my hip

i’m all i’ve ever wanted