So Many Things I’Ve Exposed Myself To

So many things I’ve exposed myself to
I had to integrate in order to overcome and survive.
And things I didn’t choose to see and wish
I hadn’t. It’s a flurry of a day and the sky
is almost industrial for a small, country town.
Slush and slurry of above ground emotions
that haven’t mastered their medium enough
to stop wallowing in the slop bucket of the heart
and throw everything out that isn’t a vital organ.
Diesel two track snow ploughs rattle the windows
out of their winter torpor, fogged in by the patinas
of grimy memories and the sidewalks are salted
like Carthage. Traffic lights blink and sharp corners
rear up into equestrian eyelids of brown water.

And then I fall through the earth as if I’d said
no worse, there is none, and the elevator plunges
another dozen floors to the thirteenth precipice
I’ve teetered on today in a kind of existential ballet
that feels like two swans mud wrestling
for the same dumpster. The air oppressively damp
with athletic ashes. All the women packed like astronauts.
Lean, homeless dogs shivering for affection
with their heads bowed down and their eyes turned up
pathetically pleading for hand-outs from the heart
as if they’d been beaten into a false humility
by their tormentors. If life were a blues band,
they’d play harp. They’d wail at the meanness of the world.

The day passes like a loveletter from an anti-muse.
I’m fumbling for the G-spot on enlightenment.
Something beautiful and sincere to slash me open
like an envelope full of nothing if echoes don’t count.
I don’t want to be stuck here forever
like a shepherd of wolves in a sheep pen,
every second thought shedding me like a snakeskin
in a civil war between solitude and commotion.
I don’t want to huddle under a red canoe
I wear like Napoleon’s hat or a courier de bois
with a scarlet sense of life trying to keep a poppy alight,
the smoke of a small, smouldering fire
making love to the ghosts of old paramours.

Except for you who stayed that winter
like a summer constellation camping out
in the Arctic, bushing it out in the rough
like a sex kitten with tigress claws blooded on the moon.
That was sweeter than pears and sacred strawberries
in a still life with the shadow of a knife
balanced like a partial eclipse on the edge of the table
that always held my attention like a compass needle
looking for true north like a hermit thrush in an ice-storm.
God what I wouldn’t give to see you again,
not as a consolation for all the pain we avoided,
but a flame that cherried the chimney pipes with lust
and burned all the embedded bubbles of lunar creosote
out of our oceanic emotional lives for a while.

Recess in the cemetery without a school bell.
Shipwrecks at the bottom of a wishing well
with only the fireflies and reflections of the stars
trying to warn us to stay away from the lighthouses
swinging their semaphoric lanterns on shore for salvage.
I remember as vividly as tomorrow shape-shifting
in the soporific drift of two galaxies passing through
each other in the commingling of a calling
summoned to a seance even the living couldn’t ignore
when we made love on the floor in the heat
of a Napoleon airtight and you were Poland.

Did you ever get free? Did you ever establish
your independence? And that feline body of yours,
does its passive resistance still know how
to turn a fist into the caress of a wildflower
with an open palm and impossible longings?
I’ve been a root fire in an incense burner
of apostate cedars ever since my worst desire for you
and every once and awhile I still smudge
the bats from the attic at the very thought of you.
I can’t look at a salmon rose without seeing you
like Venus in the sunset above a highway parking lot.

It was winter and on a moonless night
when the lightbulb had burned out in the housewell
you still cast shadows on the snow hot enough
to keep things from absolute zero freezing
like glacially slow tears weeping in the mirrors
of my third eye, knowing it would have been an insult
to love you spiritually when I could embrace
death in the flesh as if you were the succubus of my dreams,
Lilith who made it back to the garden, childless,
or Meridiana who got Pope Sylvester into the Vatican.
I’ve never repented, recanted, or reinvented you.
I’ve always been grateful you wanted more than a muse
from me, and what I had to give I’d give trebly
as any trinity just to stand here in these flames
a fully enlightened heretic with incendiary names
for the wind that swept like a hand in blessing
over the flammable firepits of my human divinity
as I catch you out of the corner of my eye sometimes
like the waxing moon in a waning window, undressing.