"in fact" - gregory and the hawk
#1
in fact i don't wanna be friends
Spaghetti noodles
Their twisting highways
They're around your fork,
For now—there embracing.
As your fingers wrapped,
succinctly surrounding silver
worn and bring the noodles slip and slide into your mouth.
The way the noodles unwound themselves—from and in again between the tines
The lapping suction of pierced lips on wet grain-worms,
your tongue trilling tones against metal tongs
Lips,
tongues,
sucking - you're invading acoustics
your mouth—flecks of sauce linger on it
a stray spatter on your nose
the left nostril,
you sense it, you wipe it away
you
tomatoey sauces
yours, it was mushrooms slices and garlic bits
oregano and parsley,
homemade and homegrown,
A crimson thickness staining your lips
it was your mouth—I tasted myself on
I wanted to,
taste myself on you
I wanted to taste you—
I did.
your skin
taut
muscles
curving, winding black ink
hips
arcing down into clinched white
tight errless folds
you glowing in the darkness of near-morning, open windowed
your attic
The sheets, the spread, your bare skin.
The suds that slipped off my skin in the morning
standing alone in your granite-tiled shower,
I removed you with her pomegranate shampoo
With her toothbrush, spearmint toothpaste,
I washed myself in her smells
I removed the film you'd left with her taste
You were probably reminded all the way down the stairs I descended
The salt on your lips an aftertaste, iced awareness coating
The belly like a soft-shell crab's underneath my tongue—
A stalactite glazed over the back of my throat
The ribcage on the roof of my mouth—my mouth
left open, full of these places, dusted over with flecks of dead skin.
Yours truly,
and I felt you before I felt you
did you feel me too?
#2
lye's pith and lava
You are the in between of glass,
the see through part.
the shards of ice crystal fallen from a Northern sky,
where only flurries fall it seems—
an accident you found me
tripping in the middle of a thick forest deep—
the balding center of a middle-aged man's head
stood opening onto a tiny globed world of differentiating flakes.
A gift given, shaken to see the snow swirl around in it's captured tornado form
and wound to hear it's tinkering jingle bells whining in weaving return.
And all the "hellos" and laughter
all the jokes and games—like when you'd take hold of my hand and squeeze.
and the peach-kissed cheeks and jeans,
the ring round the middle of my left handed finger
the parts of me you've taken
In each of your photograph's frozen—all of it
stripped away as you stand alone in your winter
And something in your face, on your pale skin bared
something, a balding vacancy, I saw even as
the bloated clouds in your manmade sky colored and crafted this—
your suspended self.
In the slanted back and forth motions of an arthritic forearm, her wrist at an angle
A white-colored pencil on a cardinal blue piece of construction paper,
it was really quite simple when I saw—when I saw you and I wanted
to take you up, all your criss crossed shapes and lines, and tuck you alongside.
As easy as the water, cascades down my wet morning skin
I am the plastic melded into filmy building blocks—the shower wall
make-shifted bubbles inside, I wanted you as one of them
you, but you'd never sit still.
And it was your winter bed I left myself suspended
naked praying in; awake
with both eyes open and blinking—you'll never know the words I write about you as
we are still just
we are all just humming skin.
#3
taboganning
It's hibernation season again, and I've grown
Seething in my own settling adipose,
in my flightless plumage, my penguin skin
I scarcely find it in me to stare back at myself.
I've found no reason to change my ways—
as a new year waddles in.
Rosey-cheeked and ample bosomed;
more warmth to come by on a rack of sinewed bones.
I'm cleaving…
to a thick fallen snow fourteen years in the making
a pricker bush no longer standing
shrouded in a cloak 2 feet deep, a peddler's voice to the infantile.
Daylight savings came to pass (fourteen times nonetheless)
I've scarcely breathed to notice
to photograph my footprints. To have experienced joy—snowfall, fluorescent bareskin, moonlight spewn as the sun stirs
a six year old's eyes through tilted blinds
breathe, cloud, shallow
swallowing
It is only now that I recall
and want it back.
I am alone.
Aside from this I sit, amongst friends.
With a bottle of plum wine and 3/4 tempo I've come—drowning in and out his or her words,
all penguins are counter-shaded just the same and still,
insatiable is my will to record these moments—
of laughter without the nagging knowledge that it will soon end
a kiss with no conclusion (eye's open)
a wedding band stitched in wrinkles
the comfort of a past,
a present where held breathes can only last so long
this long this year.
I've seen a richer purple.
Edges bitten by orange flames, dull, a stricken imbalance like wind.
Nothing again will ever be this easy, life
the living.
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