alive

Oh, to be a fish,
to feel eddies lick your gills,
to defy mazes of coral, to dart,
to disappear, to move as one with many...

To see the bait,
to take it unblinkingly,
and swallow the razor sharp hook
latching onto your innards.
Oh, that cruel blood:
a reminder of life and a harbinger of death
--but a simple death for there is no distinction
between instinct and temptation

But I was born human

Halloween

"Focus," she said, otherwise life will grab you by the skin
of your neck and dunk your head underwater and lead you
to so many apples your teeth barely graze as your dying
breath escapes from lungs too fragile to resist drowning
in an ice cooler of temptation:

A precious smile, one corner upturned, one corner
a scowl dotted with stubble you wish he wouldn't shave
pigment has crept out of that little patch of gray
he's salt and pepper
good for your palate and bad for your heart

You wish for a second, a minute, that the pad of your index finger
landed on those albino whiskers, the pad of your middle finger
on his carotid, the paint rubbing off and coloring you yellow,
your thumb on his lips, guiding his jaw gently towards yours

The last grain has tumbled from the top of your hourglass
down your sternum, sticky, into your navel and stuck there
it stays and the clock perpetually strikes midnight and
the pendulum swings and you both close your eyes and your conscience
steals that kiss

all you have is the haunting
the memory of lapse
and welts on your nape from those forceful fingers of fate

Anticipation

There are no stanzas for the unfaithful, no words for those
addicted to words, no couplets for your fingers scrawling out
letters, tracing alphabets of foreign languages they never learned.
The calloused tips flutter over a novel of temptation you want
to wish you never succumbed to but Hemingway's lemonade parted
your lips and circulated blood to your cheeks and every word
is a miracle, orgasmic, an uncertain god who will surely vanish
in your most desperate moment. There are no haikus for that kind
of crumbling, I-warned-you-so loss, no sonnets for the fading memory
of a fading smile, no poems for a broken man.