If you could, would you breathe for me?

 

Softly over the elbowed night, a tapestry of chocolate folds

merging so as if the air

could sink our lungs into a state of one breath,

one sleeping liquid.

 

 

I cannot bring it in close enough.

 

The safe place to meet is whispered

in the very place I shudder – eyes closed,

bare, honest, unperformed -

and here the other is as

blank as me,

a thing to wait,  silent outside a touch

and hard to not being the one

to blow the night up with stars.

 

If you were me,

if I were you,

twisted in the neurosis,

half embalmed in the jealousy, the limbs would pleat -

growing a velvet noose,

a velvet voice,

a varicose.  My throat plump with alcohol

a nonsense splits; a fear to bore in sweet fits,

a mouth devouring what you are -

a spread of time like a serpent's blood.

 

The fever sits and bores and bores,

 

and bores and bores,

 

you are a chore to wait for

and yet

 to ignore you

is a sharp cardiac; a punctured thought

of love, taut behind my eyes.

 

(These things are unfair,

 intolerable things, although to seperate you from this

is unimaginable.)

 

The other sings again,

dumbing down my days with beta blocks

of what if, what if, what if,

ga gum ga gum ga gum...

 

there is a movement of water inside...

 

....a bath of pearls,

black ones,

my waist steeped in soars

of pupils –

a bathroom on the moon,

and my back to you,

saluting me; the shadows

from where I demand.

 

If I were one to breathe,

the other would come,

dangling over my bed;

my sigh,

a flower

from a grave,

my jaw, a cobweb;

a loose thread of misunderstood words

thought as traps and a nothing to seduce you,

touching my pulse,

taking the breath through the suck.

 

(Sleep and breathe again.)

 

Sleep;

sedated as the mother’s cud,

violent as the vulva -

 

the other

is wanting of insomnia.