i just have a lot of feelings

for those whose arms

generously

encompassed my frame

and returned

the animal, the hunted,

my body seize in fear,

father,

you haunt my 

temples, wrists, and

warm spaces

beneath the condensation on windows,

where lips, breath, meet

in the way you smile

I miss the gauntness of my sadness,

the sight of my ribs

and my fingers playing them.

Instead I am repulsed my my softness,

the contented flesh

making home on my hips.

I am the filthy hypocrite,

in love with the shapes of others and

preaching pride,

hiding my own blush beneath

I can’t see the moon this Winter

and I try to suck her into my stockings,

clutching to the last sprigs of my cycle

like the lonely to her lover.

Don’t abandon me

with myself,

Moon,

let the ticking tide over

the scrabbling and finally

the head which leaves the body and the heart

Locked in a bartering of limbs,

a far-fetched exchange lips

looping looping and cigarettes drop ash

and grow dim.

Forgotten, dark breathing,

beneath debates in the night

Don’t you

cut off my words,

my whisky-thoughts didn’t

wander without reason.

You don’t see She as 

We do, you He,

you sit beyond the scope

of her miscellaneous venom.

The narrowed eyes and

errant judgement,

ever over-looked by the You’s who

have never suffered her glances.

Don’t you

tell me to relinquish

My sting,

because I will not

suffer Her

poised between 

a man

and a hard place.

I let myself loose

in a lovers arms,

and though I do not forget myself

I can’t remember

how to breathe.

Because I can still taste

the sadness in my teeth,

I train my feet to move

hang-over sadness,

the dry heave of a body

after one unwelcome four a.m.

i clean the bedroom,

the lounge, shifting

one piece of paper

atop another,

again,

the mythic quest for perfection

the straight line

I can’t tell whose limbs are whose as I steady myself inside them.