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There’s a small tick

at the corner of your mouth

and it plummets into sadness

muscles dropped beneath the skin

stretching each and every year

to a sculpture wrought with slackness.

Here the lines are sharp engrained

like paper mache puppets

telling us just where you’ve been

and how the weather lashed you.

 

*

Shadows writhe on city streets but you hold the smell of mountains, sky so blue it filched the tint from your eyes leaving us staring into opaque hardness wondering what is missing:  trying to find a meaning.

*

There’s a small tear in your side

we’re not talking about

the blood of Christ, but something similar.

After the Ave Marias

no holy water can assuage your thirst

and the two robbers on either side

simply take up space.

 

*

 

Maybe it’s my pathology that shrinks away from your engulfing attempts at control, it makes me wonder how you can have lived so long and know so little. There is something obscene in your schoolboy necessity to love with a love that encompasses annihilation. I, so afraid of being engulfed back away, keep safe distances and strong armour between us. There’s something to retrieve from all this fear, something to hold conferences around, something to attire myself in.

 

Perfumed oils

heat of desert sun

cacophony of tombs

revisiting

my lost extension.