John Tustin

I love you like Pablo loved Matilde,

From the fertile stalks of your thighs

To your eyebrows that are

Two intimate furrowed darknesses.

My memories a soldier held in place,

Frozen under the razorwire of

A long-ago field of battle.

I lie there, always dying, never dead,

The ghost of your lips slightly parted

And showing your teeth a little

Hovering over my bottomed-out self.

 

My body floats withered

Along the river Ganges that is your abandoning love.

I come to the mountain where the river of your love

Ends

And I look upward

To find all the birds flying have stolen your wings

And all the animals who gaze upon me from their jungle shadows

Are wearing your eyes sewn over their own.

 

This heart of mine is an earthworm writhing in the sun,

The knowledge of your wan contentment without me is that sun.

I think of your back arching, your hair thousands of blazing black-crimson beams

Dazzling in all directions where

The cries of your orgasm and

The tears of your complacency merge:

The water from your eyes stagnant drops upon your smugly grinning cheeks.

This heart of mine is a bottlecap twisted into the dirt,

Just a nick of metal emerging to glean a single moment a day

When the sky is clear and the sun that is your wan contentment is strong.

 

I love you like Pablo loved Matilde –

My depth of feeling like a great opera reverberating in my mind

That sloughs off of my body in constant flakes

As if dandruff in my eyebrows.

I lie on my back and look up at the sky that is now purple like your expression

And I watch the birds taking off and landing from the cliffs and the trees,

Wearing the stolen wings of an angel who has left me

Below

Betrayed

Waiting and waiting and waiting.