Oh great love,
you, great mold that grows in my lungs,
sporing and sparring for sparse air.
Everything we are we inhale.
Move now—flail in particles to choke on, trip on,
rip our clothes on, and tear off tender and bleeding.
A needle in the noise, a flesh race, a threading taste,
a wave that rushes the wrong way down our throats.
Push on these flushed lungs—
want and want and want.
The dregs of the drugs will come in grace:
a clay crust, one film over our frail meshed bodies,
a tape that whirs and spits our names,
indistinguishable, blue and blind, saliva stained.
You whisper into my hair,
Alive and alive and alive.
So whittle us into a diagram of a smoked out organ,
painted out faint on the back of your childhood skin,
once pliant pink, flitting in eyelid stings.
Sing honest now, in your nicotine coat, warm and rasping for me.
You’re collared up, brushing soft curls,
falling out and riding runs.
Take a hit, hit your stride, double down.
Exhaust and exhaust and exhaust.
Lie with me here, a concave sound, sweet and stagnant.
Web out in your shed sheets,
or shell up and breathe in.
Feel it and feel it and feel it.
Hold me in this heaven hole, this sober spent song
and cry into my open mouth.
To have this body, poised and porous.
To have this body, all to have yours.
Everything we are we undo.
