Melancholy Boy Wonderland

My flora is trapped Betwixt Chimerean limbs; By this dangerman In my built-in four-poster. Teaseticular art Right there on the bedspread; Eagle-spread, My legs are Red-sea-parted. Damaskuline, these sheets; And there are herculean sins Occurring meanderneath. Music is moanotone And Oeditory hymns burst From trident tongues, Victrollated and damnified. We speak in myth-dated Greek, Your lips annotating The tragedies from mine. Minotaurian fury, Let them till my earth like rainfire. Let the trebuchet rocks Catapult my castle-gates. Gluttony at its finest. Beastitudes at their most dire. Infringe the sea, my Argonaught. Let my eyes flair beyond the sky. Satyrate me with your lyre. The nymphony we shall perfect. This drunken night we shall spend Inthrusticated, And you shall sleep inside. Vaginally.

My Big Darling Pierre,  Am I the Little Darling still?  When the evening reveals you  And prayers can’t hide what you are  What I am––we are The Devil’s surrogate wombs  For trickled children. Millions of children Never taking limb. My tadpoles on the floor, Your tadpoles in my rectum–– Am I the Little Darling still?  What secrets we have, Big Darling.  I’ve kept mine since I was five,  Young but old enough  To peel action-figure clothes  And kiss hard-muscled toys, their wicked bones. Secrets from which I lacerate,  Secrets that the four corners of that room ate.  Secrets like paint That drenched the pillows down,  Shaped like moans that the sheets Had muffled out.  But for you, Big Darling The secret was formed too late; You only had until daybreak. Should I be blamed? But we flared, Big Darling, we flared, Didn’t we? Like witches burnt in stakes We blazed and didn’t care, did we? What gift you left, Big D. I should have refused it. Instead I basked in it, Instead I bled for it, Instead I held your arms While your breath Drenched my hair with it. While your lips dampened my cheeks, Helping the Little Darling drift To sleep. No rescue for that night; Head-on towards disaster, Towards daylight With fingers intertwined, Yours on mine. Scarlet Souls we’ve become. With these secrets underneath our skins, With these cherry sins. We pay them now with the seas, With the interring silences, With mud-eyed pretenses. The girl you will marry, The kids she will bear–– The things I will bury! O Big Darling! That night I drowned deep,  But you drowned deeper I know,  And will drown Deeper still. I had you Big Darling , Like trinkets and didn’t let go––  I couldn’t–– In that night of feeding.  Will you cry? Will you ever let Him Forgive you?  Barefaced, I let you take me With breaking lust, You heaven-breathing pederast.  You impaled and held me  The way I yearned to be held and impaled,  The way Little Darlings should be.  My answered prayer,  My mordant flair,  My acid care, What skeletons we bear.  My tortured heir! My Pierre!

Through the agon, it wails. A centipede huffing in the shadow, in the murkfield of years ago. Once in a while, it greets the air to scratch your chest and shock you into a ninny. A memory has many feet, and each one carries flame. The past is a monster we nurture unwittingly. The way the air smells can awaken it and insects will rain from the ceiling. The past knows no warning or wiggle room. Lady Future cannot escape it. Lord Present is never smart enough.

From smoke I willed him. I must have. Because I have never seen skin so supple, so sinewy. And just like that in the rain, on mercurial feet, he arrived under an umbrella, brimming with beauty and portent. His gaze was tender, lips curved into a bow, trained towards my chest, I didn’t know. He slipped through the webs and reached the buried youth underneath my wrinkly sheath, and thereupon nursed me. Through each trick and demon, through every bruise and cotton, through every quill and button, He tiptoed over the bones. For seven days, we made earth ram into heaven. We made fire hail like spring, and between canine kisses were generous drips of candy. The sanctified, the glorified, the glorious, the sacred, the wild, the heathen– we shaped our limbs to make them, over and under the tide of sheets and pearly moans, until redolent oboes and skinsong drifted about, darting echoes on surfaces of gray. He came and came and came, In my clench, his piston, his rabid game. I drank and drank and drank twice every way. The vagrant and the tame, virgin heart and whore teeth– the lap and the suck and the masticate…  and then the decay came like a wail. Like a harmony of skulls that used to grim, to skin. Like the rattling of steeds over falling dirt. He was my lore, after all. I made him from whimsy. And then he was ashes after the soar. And I wept as he left in the flurry. His eyes, his slick, his soak that faded into the smoke from whence he came before.

It seems you’ve always got soul to spend. But never wisely. In the twilight of your thirties, the dawn of forty, you stretch your legs out and dip it in the salty water of urban lovers, romanticide, the uncut collection – adventures you think could never hurt you. What poor memory; how palpable the reality you weave like an arachnid’s hide. But nonetheless, all your evenings will end with a door opened, and you will amass the faces, and you will summon them on hours of hard-on wakefulness, and they will serve you. But amidst this chaos, somewhere in the numberlessness, you always end up with that man that will cost a little bit more soul. Despite knowing all that charming small talk over a bottle of wine is just a pointless dance, the “storm” clicks. As it almost always does, the dance culminates in nakedness and urgency, and if you both pretend that the walls are painted red, the slamming will become a lilting and the lilting will begin another slam. Multiple phases between the gentle and the barbaric. All night long. Somewhere in the second coming, you know a third will come soon after. And so fourth. And here is where the storm meets the sea. Like a heart-eyed idiot, you begin to misread the lip service. You begin to translate the Latin that isn’t there. The kisses will sound like a soulmate. The tangled limbs will sound like a guarantee. The laughter will sound like a future. And that embrace will be pistol-strong like a pair of arms has never bullet you. And all that carnage spreads into a canvas of reawakened hope, a belief  in a promise that’s never held its words longer than a night’s sleep, but has kept breathing in the blackened ruins of your innermost dreams. And this is the art of spending soul, isn’t it? Mighty and hurtful. Where you mistake something for the best parts of what passion can offer, what love can create, and pay it without checking the tags. A cycle you thought you’ve broken that always ends up in a cycle you begin. And come morning, the sun will incinerate every inch of it that’s been inside you. When, instead of meeting your touch the man clenches and pulls away from it. Quite cruelly. Quiet cruelty. And like a loom of thunderheads, every memory of slapping skin will be crass, and before you is just a nakedness without any of the intimacy from the night before. Not even a residue, neither a coin. You’re an unpaid whore, an insult that he dressed so well. A prince fattened and honeyed to serve the fire. And so you lie there, jilted and betrayed. Full but inexplicably hollow. You hear the coldness in his voice. You listen to the shower, the shuffling, the door. And in the stillness, the unraveling is as familiar as a brown sea, and you berate yourself once again for being complicit to your own bankruptcy.

Ten drills like fingers with hungry eyes, come see how they baffle with wigglement; the new settlement is called Hearticide - where my chest kicked the bucket and dangled on a marine, - where my catamite skin, covered in half-boiled whites, try to reclaim embraces that sneaked out at dawn. Little devil, you ovoid head, mixing in the carpet and tartan, your words aren’t a Spartan, after all; just a chalk outline, spread-eagled. My eyes are inked. I did not see the penultimate, and the cliffhanger did more than hang. I caught the tendrils of your scent, the murk-brown foggotries that hazed my homo. These ten tackles are shades of vulgarine. Next time twirl the decade around my neck, why don’t you? Don’t leave me half-dead, be-nude, bedazzled, befuddled, benumbed, aching for the bubbles of the sea. Your coward disguise is just as briny. These straits are a mechanism you machinate, and then try the damnedest to escape. Molluskian feast, my mouth in saintly rapture, a fool, in the end. A beady eye, carcassi  on the sheets. I am always your half-eaten treat.

Coquetry under the October moan, fisheye in the stargaps. This is our love – cemetery long; sneakened tiptoes through the kitchen door when Mother Vulture falls deepest from her evening quota of lipwork and abuse. In our province, lipwork meant differently, and here swam the abuse our limbs could abide. In the graveyard, poetry wrung like heartfalls in the dark, and I twist as a febrilite did under fevered inferections. Under your fingerbreath, my waist burrows and clenches. Under our hide, we undulate the meaning of seas. Obscedian on our skins, our fleshly harangue. Let me live in your abyss awhile longer and bury my face in the landscape of yours so we can abyss together and create our own endlessness, our own piety, without the gongs of the world’s flagellashings and whoremudgeons. Without the judgment of god-eyed maulerfrockers hiding behind altarine, religiocide sensibilities. Above the mausoleum steps where the statues of the dead we didn’t know, hail our liaison in providence, we are far from all these, and we rule. This spare, these guiles honor our monument. The eyeball of our sin-fruits, let it see the worst; the glistener to our darkened promises, let it hear the agon of our throes. Days are coated in shadow. Nights shine us. We witch, we root. 

Stasis in chaos, no momentum, only repetitions of naked energy in humdrum waves. Look at the skin, and the salt, and the glisten, the foam. These mermaid fins, these silver scales aren’t mine– or maybe they are, but not the way I want them scaled, sailing opposite from how I want it finished. Journey and destination, it doesn’t matter; forced to look for rubies underneath the wailing tides, that showed their seaweed teeth in ever-grin, so stable and degenerate. I can’t see land nor sniff it. I want to molt, molt into the minutes so they could bury me, so I could pearl so good I’d break the shell. I have blood to trade, you see, obsidian like a universe. Wasn’t I supposed to bleed the stars for the word-eaters? The biblio-cannibals that resided in the spires? Instead I’m locked in the surf, harvesting rubies in the murky bluescape of the faded. I could pass for a siren, with this much salt to wail, and also so many wails to salt. In truth, I am the ocean’s marionette fattened duly by the treasures I do not desire. It shatters the hours for me: ruby this or you die. So I breathe and wear them around my neck. They afford a hefty swimspace for my tail, where I can’t write a single tear where I can’t scream a single tale.