There were 16 faces behind mine–
deep incandescent slivers nobody saw.
Lewd medical appraisals were thrown 
against my uneven teeth, eyes like telescopes 
emptying into black holes,
the calm despair of psychosis in my breath.

Doctors penciled furiously on their pads 
when I broke out with articulate phrases 
while the others who saved me 
from drowning while I was myself 
were pinned down and dissected in a white room
then disposed off quietly in the recycling unit.
 

Jesolo Revisited

Here beyond the hand
where the hand is sail
headless blue fishes 
undulate on shifting skin

Now is brazen sand
in the car where we wax
love with arms around 
entangled breaths

Wind is tongue 
twisting into salt song
that familiar slosh of waves
trapped in empty shells

Here where stars 
green the skin 
an internal tattoo mouthing 
tu solamente tu
 

To L.U.

This is the Cornucopia of Drought.

Where lambs pant under a mirage of dusty rain
        that pricks the soil like phantom fleas.
Where crops are suicidal scythes
        miming 'up-yours' to a sizzling azure sky.
Where you are Sense
to all these whining weeks
        that scrounge on their hands and knees
        for bugs to devour at noontime.

And you are now not there.
 

Things I'll Never Tell

I may phone just to talk about Schrodinger's box -
what the cat had for dinner or brunch,
maybe confess in that niggardly Victorian way
that I love you - just a little, not too much.

You wonder why I'm drinking lately
laughing too loud maybe, suddenly scared
of aliens and reanimated Mums under the bed.

With a book for pillow and a pillow for book
I guzzle grains of coagulated cocoa and choke
(so, you're staying late for work - again?)
on the bitter sap which blackens Medea's teats.

You ask me now and then, "What's the problem?"
I speak: Nothing, nothing, nothing at all.  Fermat's 
last theorem obscures me on paper with a sudden cross.

There are just some things I can never tell.
 

Aubade

Remember me
& that wild rush of screeching brakes
        (like the euphoric crowd that insisted on
        some messiah's death)
Love is the alabaster pink
of nipples on the mortician's table -
        & cold
that self-destructive cold
which demands a cut of veins in return

Let me spill down
that crack in the ceiling
call you by your secret name
with a scirocco-laden siren voice
as I spread myself on your morning bed
& help you climax to your pain