"Addict"

Minor breakdown. All these faint euphemisms to salve gravity’s lashes, iambs to stitch the welts on lips, tendons, vertebrae, but what tender voodoo can undo the undoable now? Not poetry, not your most liberal fingerprints, not heads welded together in statuesque ache— So I lost six days, my love, in that black, putrid chantry, so I knelt on stone-shredded knees shadowing the silhouettes of shadows It was nothing really, I tripped back like a flung door into sewn scabs, trusted drugs, the dribble-grey hole of my own invention, every backbent wing a confidant, every inscribed letter an epistle. Momentary lapse. Forgive me for saying what I most needed to say, murmured, murdered into the spire that’s slitting up your righteous lap, shiver-shook and glacial, bloodletted and blue, the leached light squirming in So I lost six days, my love, like an icicle loses its fang, venom drained, half-mugged and half- surrendered, half-gnarled by the thaw, but don’t even my lies happen to be true now and then? Disconsolate dawn takes the reins from roughshod night, the damage becoming clearer, more foolish, in its chronic bath— so now I have that junky grammar scrawled on my skin again.