Penelope

An ordeal,
to separate red from yellow
I see you go down before my eyes
a sweet narcotic mixture
Your eyes don't stop anywhere
He palsies with the crowd
Next door she cries in his paper arms
You think dumbness means honest
and wrap it up with your attempts at humanism,
loving and serious.
or is she laughing? I dream of you
a host, a shaft, a wedge
that next day burdens out
Will and obsession equal science
it binds these Stalin-bones, memories
And you splat out so far you're desolated
Pragmatism culls
Hard lake, glass, I looked it over
I turned it in my eyes like a computer
But, yeah, she talks sense
cooped-up in bed

A soft worm of selflessness nestles and curls inside her,
take it into your soft heart
cursed and forgetful.
My love withdraws like an army
a slow asp of words seethes in the white crack of your elbow

My heart flaps out of its fish-tank
in the middle of conversation
imagining every noise
near you
every trivial honour I come up with

Stoically, I watch your ghost ship blown back
from the bay
The white-armed women hold me in failure
rubbing from my eyes
the heart a rack of ice
and I forget

I'm law if this is waiting
I watch the videos of dead
the wraiths of love I limit
like car-sickness
Being eulogized, they slide into the horizon like a coin
The world gets out of it
and goes to bed.
You could've been shimmering in his arms
with a new code of pragmatism
Stop tears with coke
Limp home to another baby.
Proportionately, you're strong
winding him into bed
My brain's pillars cave in under last week
Eyes a river flooding in a blindfold round your head,
a mask, an opening.
Perfect, meanwhile, turns in her arms like a key