Poetry

The Diplomat

White knuckled grasp on your tight buckled back

I lie my trap in the black harbor back

behind the tired diplomat while he tracks

the time he spends waiting on his mother’s stoop.

Chipping his plaque with the tip of his flag

he becomes his brackish brain in the blackish bog.

His solipsistic knack he attempts to enact

in an effort to retract the incoming fog like a cataract

thumbtacked over the barren swamp.

I go unnoticed in my white slacks and my bear back,

him entirely missing his opportunity for counterattack but

this is the way we remain in contact.

The diplomat with the tight buckled back he loves me and that’s that

He will follow me with his flag into the bog with the fog and he will come for me and

it will be our final act,

our undying contract with the seal forever intact.

Fuck you, Morrissey. You know nothing of Joan of Arc.

A heartbreak

A nagging toothache

Joan of Arc, aged 09, scoring shards of cloudy glass beside the interstate

We sit together and

Our jaws shake

the righteous words of the saint her

lips will never allow to permeate

mine and Christ’s blood ruminate

illum…                inate.

I contemplated death nineteen times today

swimming along my veins in sure lines that situate

Themselves alongside my pain

And I fucking hate poems that rhyme

At least not like this

I don’t like it this time.

I settle my grievances for deviances in the limelight of passion

To know you is to hold you

You’re my light baby, make it happen.

To show you,

To console you,

through that damning night back then

Sandstone in my throat, I breathe through holes

Each gulp I ration

Only to deliver it back to you in treacherous gasps

I couldn’t bear to hold it all in.