1. Inspiration

In.

I unlock my lungs.

Snakes and centipedes crawl, back of your hands, constricting 

Flesh. Every touch solid, deliberate, there. A transformation

From gas to solid. I am only real when you feel

What I feel without vaporizing: reassurance. 

Muscles fibers tissues stretch:

The gelatinous threads refusing to break

To snap to yield. Tangling, stretching, hanging on.

The summer you told me love was the temperature of New Mexico. 

Two halves of a lotus root.

I envy the pockets of those bluish jeans, white strips.

Raw, raw as fabric can be, against your skin, 

Around it, enveloping it. A nest,

The one that magpies built outside your window

In that square space above Santa Fe, suspended

Only by the hope-filled and desperate scent of cheap acrylics

Respiring in the heat, as if organic. 

Let me be home:

Take your sandals off in my mouth. I taste

Coarse sands, the desert. Hang

Your jacket, the leather one that kills me, 

On a tooth. Head down my throat, run

If you want, if you are tired and can wait no longer 

To the left chamber, the good one, untouched. 

Your room, mine is right next door, connected. 

I will keep breathing for you.

2. Digestion 

That painting, yours, of me, found home

On a white wall near 72nd Street 

Before we did. I swallowed the furniture – 

The deformed chair with wooden legs you found rotting on the curb, 

Sunday crosswords in your lap.

The love-stained mattress, home to a colony of ants. 

Tickles.

The dining room table stabilized by folded poems that expired long ago,

We never chewed back then—

An Eastward train. 

Summer in New York clung

To the body, you complained. I didn’t. Because

It was your shirt: the blue, too-small one

That soaked me up and blended seamlessly 

With my meager existence. Woven into, sewn under, embedded beneath

My skin. Absorbed by the cells. Replacing them.

Undressing would be blood.  

A life-containing vomit splattered 

Across the studio in Greenpoint. Ours. 

I spat jagged frames onto the East wall facing Norman,

Coughed stacks of books onto the teetering shelf,

Spewed plates and forks and the green Dutch oven, your mother, 

Into kitchen cabinets next to the checkered glass

Confronting sunset. Done with the powerful inferno that engulfed

The undulations of Sangre de Cristo alive. 

I turned myself inside out, unrecognizable but unscathed. 

You were scared. I wasn’t. 

Because you were there. Because you stood next to me.

Because you… every sentence began.

3. Metabolism 

Europe. It rained. I drowned in champagne and appetizers

Beneath a heavy sky of pretension. 

Inspired. Original. Tour de force. 

They loved you but a fraction.  

The house upstate wobbled into our lives, then. Comfort.

Like me, it was dead before you sprinkled 

Cosmos and daisies and fox glove and Queen Anne’s Lace

And Brooklyn and the desert and those jeans and that shirt 

Everywhere – 

The canvas for you, Pollock. 

‘And tell me this: I must be absolutely sure.

This place I’ve reached, is it truly

Ithaca?’ 

Receding, replacing, regenerating,

Telomeres chipping away like a bar of old soap, used.

You shed your skin. I held on to mine,

Gripping as vehemently as I squeezed your hand that night,

Miles ago, when your mother became smoke,

Leaving ashes behind. 

I slept covered in your dust. 

4. Decay

Memorialized in 18 by 24s. Our lives glimmering 

Along stretches of emptiness, a retrospective: 

My Poet and I, Among the Lost People, Starscape, Some of the beautiful things that Heaven bears.

My eyes knew the topography of white walls 

Better than the curves of my own body.   

‘There is no greater sorrow than to recall our times of joy 

In wretchedness.’

You said you didn’t need saving. I lied to you for the first time 

When I said I understood. 

The villa in Puerto Vallarta, you missed the sun.

The vibrations of guitars and pan flutes and maracas drowned 

By the constant droning of beep, beep, beep. 

Music to my ears. 

Apoptosis turned to necrosis. I placed glass bowls of 

Narcissuses by your bed. The windows open, looking out 

Over the veranda. I knew, when you stared into the North Pacific,

Past the transparent tapestry, that you imagined 

Recreating those colors. Just right. The perfect

Shade of blue-green-white. Mermen, you would paint,

Immortal and delirious. 

What if you had never let me in, you asked. 

I didn’t know how to answer. 

I never could imagine things like you did.  

5. Expiration

A single person is missing for you,

And the whole world is empty.

Hollowed out, the best part of me, my lungs collapse 

Onto itself. To see you, I need only inhale 

And hold it, willing the ribcage to rise, the diaphragm to expand

Infinitely. Glorious pain throbs in my head, 

Banging against the cage that separates you and I. There you are. 

Hold on, hold on, 

I beg myself.

Never let go, never let go

I promise.

There you are, for a second, 

Before the pale ocean washes over me. 

I lay in a field of white flowers,

Next to you,

In the cemetery outside Santa Fe. 

Maybe the plates would shift, maybe 

Australia would crash, somehow, into our continent,

And a hole would open up, right beneath me.

Sinking, welcomed into Earth’s crumbly embrace.

A temporary home, before the next. 

I get up to leave.

‘For dust thou art, and unto dust 

Shalt thou return.’

Out.