Notes on Dark and Lightness

i
I have loved four times
to be multiplied by four;
each one became the Word,
and then a sidenote, and from that
to the small print of a footnote
scribbled into the darkness.

ii
I have at times fucked nine in a day,
(not that my youth kept any score)
and in maturity loved just enough
to fuck into existence
four beings,

      spun from the loom of hormones
that weaves up our bodies,
back and forth across wild roots:
knotted rope that binds us
to this floor of stars.

iii
The flesh of the heart
is crusted over with these scars.
Fingers bleed over this loom.
We are such threads
      spun from the golden fleece

of Crius Chrysomallus,
cut with the sword of Orion,
      we lay unsheathed
within a dark labyrinth of sin
scented of the Minotaur; it comes
to raise a roar:

      We are the hunted
and we hunt
for deliverance
from our thirst
in the craters of Venus
with the spear of Mars,

until our waters burst
to give birth to a winged cupid
that shoots you in the back
with its bow.

iv
Once the hunt is over
and the feast consumed, you lay low.
History holds you to account:

The night is a caged beast
      half-asleep. You are its half-gnawed bone;
it chews away at you. In a keep of dreams
you digest the time, as it digests you.

You won't know if the sun comes up
for now your sense of time
is a flat line.

The sea has beaten your clay smooth;
and the pollen you made honey
has glued up your lungs,
      and all the mountains you climbed
have crumbled down to sand.

v
Death has come to take you, turning
the morning into light's last stand.
An oily skin of dark
skinny-dips in your throat.
Its black fingers reach out

into your debris of shadows
to salvage some flotsam of note,
across a shattered surface of glass
blown hard in the sun's fiery kiln.
      Embers scatter, dying.

vi
You are the footnote now.
Scribbled into darkness
with ink that won't last.

vii
And in all the words you'll write
you'll find these cluster of truths
do not make one great
single truth; save for this conceit:
      that love is a light in the dark;

but love is a light of the dark,
for every love is a thirst
and every love
you will ever forfeit will take
a piece of your flesh;

and every sweetness this world provides
will turn to poison
      finally; not only
inside those who consume,
but even those who fast

and refuse to drink
      from the river of it,
and who no longer have tears enough
with which to weep
as they watch

the light go out to sea,
for the light can only penetrate
what opens up to it;
whether seen or unseen; whether
under the sea or in its shade

or in a spread of legs
lying across the pulpit
of self-made mendacity.

viii
Thus I have watched
the light go out in me;
a score multiplied by four
(sometimes nine or more in a day)
not believing it would

      drown in the damp sand-horizons
of footprints and hands
in the crease of the bay;
      for when the tide is low
the darkness is hungry

and your words will go,
until you feel your legs kicking in frenzy
as they are swallowed up
in the stomach of its apathy.

You come to understand too late
that no one knows how
another's blood drip-feeds this land,

or how to stop a night uncaged and green
that comes creeping on a hunt
      to cuff and drag its prey
down to the deepest of dreams.

xi
You may wake again.
It's called surviving.
Carrion marks scratch at the face
as sunlight to wake you from sleep;

for the light burns you,
      it ages you,
but it also opens you up

to spirits gushing in rivers
beneath a cage of skin.
Hoping.

x
And in the dark
the surface may be still,
like a body asleep,

but a mind still dreams
of fucking
some existence into being.

From the collection: "A Torch For All the Dead" >>

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