I dwell continually on those who were, in truth,
not all that great, but looked it.
No matter the soul, no matter the spirit;
my unlovely ambition that their lips, still
touched with fire,
should tell of Lust, clothed from head to foot
in longing.
And who hoarded from the rank marshes
The desires falling across their bodies like shadows.
What is precious, is never to forget.
And so their lissom ghosts surround me still,
eternal as I wither into tilth,
scintillant as I dull deathward,
an ever-finer point of torment needling the
heart’s articulations,
never to allow gradually want’s traffic to
diminish,
or the imagined sensation of my flesh
trembling beneath their ageless fingers.
My boys my boys my gadflies,
blown like glass or spun, flint-sharp
and quickened, razor-tongued and flagrant,
hauled headlong into the thundering sky.
Born of the sun, born of the winter,
born of the bloody ocean’s wrack, the darkness
tangled in the firs.
Stacked now beneath the sod, in coffins
nailed with splinters of my own flagellant’s
spine.
