Dear Opiate, touch each photograph,

   each frame of my spit-

wet skin suggesting a scene

     to be lit and played. Translate my body

like Adam naming animals. I’ve been

   trying not to mention your marriage but

       one must not put a loaded rifle on the stage

if no one is thinking of firing it, so let’s

get to it, better to know

what we’ve got, take inventory:

Here is a photograph where my legs appear

to you as wings     Here is a photograph of my eye

you call a bright pill     Here, there are no photographs

of my hands     Here, systems of lips   Here, (turn the body)

the spinal column, then buried, clustered nerve-stars

galloping from palm to cunt to sole, this picture

where the bed is a feeling you can’t shake, a box

containing ticket stubs, sea stones, a paper house,

a meadow, a film, a string of red lights—

            It’s a dream. There’s a stage, a girl, a bed, a gun.

You want her to be a room you can disappear

            into for awhile. The gun goes off and something

breaks into you, like a shard of glass that could get

in your eye, forever. You want to click your heels together three times but

that’s the wrong movie— And you were there, and you, and you—

   and all of our movies, aren’t they about going home?

There’s a bed, a stage, a gun, a girl.

   There’s a code of X’s, a sweet name,

 an extra key & how,

when we speak from afar,

you always say

you’re going home

 

 

 

 

 

 

Greyed at edges, seal-like, luminous,

he crouches naked to gather clothing we flung

last night around the room. Swims unearthly

through the morning air. Father-like, he holds

a spoon to my mouth, full of syrup.

A raw swarm of music, this becoming.

To desire the whole of a man is new, seems

both excess and necessity. To know I’d lick

his feet, his hair, the sleep from his eyes.

We underestimate what animal traffics are still

within us. Bless your crooked teeth, your appendix scar.

I am the young one, come to suckle and absolve you.