Slut Dreams

Slut Dreams

(for John Donne)

Punk cellist. Braced for banishment.

Your hectic face, your miscreant strut,

The fluctuate air hums your ruined frequency.

Your superheated breath in my superannuated back,

I turn slow and understand malnourishment

At last. I watch you break, and see you crack.

Whose skin did you inhabit today? This century?

You sucked so much from me and now you 

Don't even have enough left to borrow.

Still, I'm going to take it all, the full sum of your worth.

Can you love someone yet wish them only 

Sorrow?

Nights in Cassadaga, cool mornings in Seoul.

Give me your arms, donate your shaky armoury.

Before you I never even knew I wasn't whole,

Corrugated wharflike and rusted as a cannery.

My wary bordertown heart is like the lightning tree.

Black and crooked. Split and elementary.

Dubious as blind things writhing in a hole.

The sleek wolves smell you, the blind bears find

Your scent amid cordilleran folds 

And the tail fan of a talus

And immediately follow.

Eagles and buzzards wheel in the impossible sky.

I'm a man. I'm alive. Under the bright cold

Silver blue dome. Adamant

Draws us earthward, but

What next? To whom

Do we run? Is this where

Love goes to die or where

It might in fact begin again?

The cyclic world is giving birth

To its own addermouth end.

We will find each other in the blue-sky valley

After the carious rocks have crumbled, after

The parched trees have cracked open, everything

Once living laid bare to the world's scrutiny. And you

Will bear me from the charnel field, my brother,

My blessèd sister, deliver me to my home. You

Are of my iron heart always. You my

Mutinous pestilent love are 

Carved from my own ambivalent flesh. Did you

Dream of me or I you?

It matters not. Dream, dream, my love,

And never stop until sleep is done.