A Bespectacled Artist Called Lear

accumulating soiled linen & sweaty shirts& blue-jeans caked & clotted with our juice& teeshirts crumpled by our gloriously messy passion& underwear made stiff by all our joy.I have come home to wash my clothes.They patter on the bathroom floor like rain.The water drips away the days till you.The dirty water speaks to me of love.Steamy…

my worship of the Goddessalonecondemns you to the fire. . .I blow uponyour least fingernail& it flares cyclamen & rose.I suck flames from your ears.I touch your perfect nostrils& they, too, flame gentlylike that pale rosecalled ‘sweetheart’.Your eyelids are tender purplelike the base of the flamebefore it blues.O child of fire,O tiny devotee of the…

She looks He looks awayHe is snow-blindfrom staring at her breastsThey make loveThis is marked by asterisksthose gapsdisguised as stars***He thinks the future is a mouthShe invites himinto her apple

then stopped loving her,while she did notstop loving him.There is only one story:she loved him,then stopped loving him,while he did notstop loving her.The truth is simple:you do not diefrom love.You only wishyou did.

They whispered about us.I put yours on top of mine.They would not mate.Like poor dumb pandas in the London Zoo,they would not come together.I put them back to back.They would not sleep.I put them right side up to upside down.They would not lick each other’s wounds.The night we metyou fed me fish eggs & dark…

I have cursed you enoughin the lines of my poems& between them,in the silences which falllike ash-flakeson the watertankfrom a smog-bound sky.I have cursed youbecause I rememberthe smell of Joyon a sealskin coat& because I feelmore abandoned than a baby sealon an ice floe redwith it’s mother’s blood.I have cursed youas I walked & prayedon…