the somnambulist tendency of my heart
is toward impending middle age,
toward hairlines that crawl away from their parallel chins,
toward the dents that bifocals make in noses.
i love that bobbing of the head,
the double search for focus.
youth still wanders carelessly
through the bones that make his face,
a serene virility and such silent surefootedness;
his recklessness is sleeping, his arms are strong-
and really, what is wrong
with the purposeful distraction, the impatient
tilt of the head when his lips form the sounds of the
trochaic foot-
is there any guilt in the hidden passion,
the trance of silent fire that grips the ribs,
the heart, the lungs,
and pulls?
only weakness can make me so golden inside,
poured full of a solution that says:
break everything.
i am too meek to contort the bonds of
those twenty-year gaps, the wedding bands and
the tiny children.
i can only curl around it, protect it by ingesting it;
the selfishness requires self.
it’s written, this unsavoury, sodden diary,
on pages ripped from bibles and library books,
each word clamoring to be heard
over those long-suffered reasonable syllables that say,
be good.
but my dirty marks spill on their own,
in wreckage, in ruin, inside and out,
the stained heart, the hands, that man.