The light beneath the door

Remember when they used to bug your phone

The sound of rolling open polymer handpiece

Secrets folded in purring circle

Click, click, can aches be fixed?

What if you died

And left me a note

What would it say?

Who stands as muse

Now life has fled, her stockings shred

And bottles are emptied without drinking

I think the blood of us is watching

The shard of darkness cutting swaths of fracture across your face

Full days don’t exist

Come back here

To the light beneath the door

What does it do to beckon from shadow

If you paint from a photo, you capture no movement

Just faces in gouache

Stainless steel and fascimile reflection

A few minutes fooling ourselves

Nothing was sacred
Not even one thing?

If the lie was eaten

Did it vanquish all the time I spent, believing it

Was I the lie?

Inhabiting falsehood and words that curled like suppliant flesh

Weren’t you there with the needle?

Obsession

The other players were faking

Plunge the sharp, feel holy numbness

I’d follow you into the hollowed mountain of your madness and my error

For of emptied places only, you reign

Heartless and ready to start over new

As if nobody had existed and nothing was sacrificed

Memory in hose and mask plays her tricks

Writes a new damask script

And obedient

You condemn

Throw me tender under bus

With falsehoods and generalization

It feels like it did the first time

That’s when I knew

And still

I let you in, to scouge and vanquish, remove me by rubbing

Those promises

I didn’t beg for them

You gave freely in pretend

Though each one wasn’t meant

Then you went to church with a clear conscience

Because only Catholics have to repent

I was an addict and I didn’t know

My drug was you. My drug was you

My drug was you. My drug was you