how the light gets in

      impatience is a virtue

      lust, not such a sin…

in flashback, the corrective

— not monster, but man..

the bits of me you annexed weren’t really yours to take — were never meant to ache with knowledge quite so soon; call it the shock of the new.

a small wonder, then, the way my body learned to defer the intrusion — loan of numbness on the never-never that still maintains itself most days (most days).

but the knots you tied my head up in pulled themselves so tight that i get tangled up on bits of the past every time i try to swim to the surface for breath,

& all these valleys i gouged out of myself trying to get free make poor gills.

the redblack thrum of your despair rings out across the decades — commanding my soul attend, & close; swallowing dull hum of the hasty tourist traipse.

prostrated, i come to pray in this closed room flatplane church of abstract jesus & his transatlantic offerings; drawn in once again to the gloomy hell of frames in frames, while behind my lids, the ever-present palinoptic bloom of future blood pools on your studio floor —

i seek no communion in here, & seagram sees no redemption even now, but still i leave each time with the impossible ache inside me

somehow quelled