———

———

if you find sweet

 

And her

her of the squalid smile:

you get cruel when someone loves you

while I laugh and bear a child

in a bit of verse and poverty

            terse  

            and repetition

            that magnificent repetition

repetition, reticent to come  

like a ragamuffin in borrowed bindings

smelling warm of sour dough

waiting for the soup

that gets my lips to turn

to praise and shed a whistle for a small room

the one that whispers a meek abetment

that provides quotation marks enough

so that, golden one

you can walk, or

run to the next pawned bit of lore

found under the man who sweats his jewels

the one kept to collect

the one that will assuage a boarding guilt

provide a carefree way to live

a subterranean bruise turning to suburban flesh  

another who pretends the notes along your mandolin

one after another until it becomes undervalued as merely skin

as the hay fever proposition of debts repaid  

while I, until you see me lick the last sentence clean,

can take my time to trade the screaming scribble

for the guise of another savage drip  

like the fabulist with broken bones,

all bluster as always, or

like an adorable Trotskyist fanciful of silver dollars,

dressed in a pupil’s clothes,

I will trade it all, more than I have

for your furs and your repetition

            and the later repetition

            and further repetition still

            until we find a way to never steal the shaking dawn again

when it will ionize us into sighing stardust  

and we forget all the pauses

that diminished

our

natural  

sfumato

and

we

can

create

new

colors

for

old

shades   

———