06.12.05 - 1:17 a.m.

New poem-in-progress.

Delphi
by me

here your brilliant mouth
here your crimson eye.
here your fire is my dawn, this roof my black sewn sky.
i exhale the memory of your fastness
like a cooked egg.

my green mouth and my hands, the scabs
of you absence, the healed-over wound,
granular with memories of the stars beneath your sun,
the set above your stage.

in corridors of sleep, i linger
the secret passageway between night and
morning. take my hand and the imprint
of my skin between times, our definitions
shrunken and split infinitives and the raw
edges of your dreams are unfinished silk
on my calloused hands. each time i open
my eyes there's another one of them in front
of my hearth, naked with need.

i want a heart. i want a hearth. i
want a child with eyes like the sky
and strong hands. i want to break him
of every foul habit and live full of
peace. i want to break him.

give me memory of my mother's eyes
at sunset and i will give you this
shred of fabric she wove as the light
failed until her eyes were pinched
and narrowset as the threads in her
in the fibers of her heart, mud and mud and mud against
the bare and barren rock.

i've listened to the snake for
far too long. oh my lord come back to me.

and that's that.