The Temple Place
Your heirloom temples, from mama, where the gold sea split, was the tenderest place. One spot in North soma of many, once when cruising my way up from your center, past the narrow of your collar bones, climbing with slow-skill your neck, I found myself there, an hour had passed, I just stayed there mid-breath kiss. It's as if I had locked in your amour-green button, you kicked on, alive. Some fantastical god of the heavens wired you together. I knew then how you'd been retrieved from under the bed, strapped to a gurney like a porcelain one ton feather and carried off into the tiny room so any He with big hands could grasp your Situation, whether your heart was still whole. There I could see you leap from hungry shadows, colliding into monsters, stuck between the screaming and the feral laughters; my lips on the on-off alive switch, except your face, feeling nothing I pushed to grieve the tears back into your pupils and bring you up from your dead and drowning voice. I wish my arms had been the sizes of Washington and London, I could have held you above my head, or stripped off your sticky chrysalis and fed it back to the belly-sagging dragons in the salt sea. Right through into those heirloom temples I went Taking every breath between us, Ridding you of your Uncle's leg, How many headaches did you suffer this demon to grab you by the hips of your rose bush, the stalks of your golden hairs? The reports escaped back into the sea. But me, I never gave way, my elbows were branded upwards, nothing could break my sleeves. Somehow still, that fever grew inside of you, The hungry shadows crept into your shoe-boxes and shelves of jewels. I could never turn away. And then one July while we sat a seashore on our heels That deleterious ghost came back Into you where I had immolated that goblin of silence. A hole just beneath your little tum. Right in the sun you burst open, your crooked arms, your wiry legs, Everything beautiful and earnest was sucked out of you, Eyes from blue to black, crown from gold to grey. Your retreat from the light, ghouls idling in your entrails, monsters with strings to your fingertips. I pray that someday soon, amidst the worries of the waking days, the sadness of the in between, and the darkness of that solemn day that I will meet your heirloom temples again. So that even as my skin begins to shrivel and stink, and my eyes slouch back and my quill shrinks, I can share your breath just once more beneath a summers' day.