Love and Prostitution: Part II

Swaddled in your darkness
no more and yet again
the tears find themselves trickling
up your coat in
an impossible non-
existent world
I die slowly, having nearly
died once
once
once and yet again
not again no more but
sublunary I am we
are transactions and—
end—the lust (love?) is
money lust lost is close
to love to love
we cannot do
who am I to talk to
do what objects don’t

sleep(ing) is no longer
rest being work being used
rest is every waking moment far
from what is done under the moon, in all
its sightly beauty, whose value I’ve dubbed
ugly my value is limited—
that is the duty of numbers—
it is a price to be paid

(but it doesn’t exist)

And pay they do for their
release, not mine, never
but always for one night
and an eternity of fire for
when coldness creeps into
our skin and we are turned
to stone, not being able
to move but tossed
tossed
tossed at birds
two birds and a stone to share
the pain, the blame, the fear
that freezes.

Wheel

I
would like
to keep your words
safe in a box of TARDIS blue—
the blue we used to paint
the intangible mailbox of lost
letters and unwanted words—
even if (though there should be none)
you had let go of the strings I had tied
around the balloons I had blown my whole
story into. And up, up, up they went
until they were no more, and you
never really got to see them, because
your eyes were still closed from trying
to live elsewhen, visiting pain
from an old wound. I got
that. And I promised myself
there would be no more

balloons. But I travel like a child,
around and around, and the next
day I carelessly gave another
one to a stranger, thinking he was blind
so it wouldn’t matter, and we parted only
to see each other again the week after, when
he told me he had been thinking
about what I had let slip through my fingers
onto his, his hands, his lips. He gave
me his word and I’ve been keeping it
safe like the dust in my place, under
my bed where the broom does not reach.

But not in a box of TARDIS blue, which I’ve reserved
only for you, for when I move forward I go
around to go back, around and around, like
a child in circles, finding things
I missed the first time around.
Dear you

     are missing

from me.
I tell myself I will one day jump
off this carousel, scrape my hands and my knees
on the ground below. And being the fixed point,
I will see you come and go; no longer
will I be the one
to be always going back.

Today I moved to Vienna, thinking I’d be closer
to you, only
to discover you
had moved to Thailand, closer
to where I began. Equidistant, we
do not meet. I wish we were
instead dancing and playing around
a maypole, getting closer and closer
but still trading places and spaces, and still
in equilibrium.

But we have to be merry, have to keep
going
around and around
like children, and back
home again.

(Take that jump with me
into the box,
where we’ll be safe. No one
would, like
you.)

Home is
where the heart is, I do
not want
to go home to
you.

Know More

You told me to close my eyes, so
I cut off my tongue instead, and you
held me to tell me everything
would be all right, but you
forgot I still had ears to hear
the creaks and the
silenced grunts, the slapping, the
weeping, the sacrifice. I was

to you
a treasure
to keep, so I cut
off my legs so I wouldn’t run

away. Little girls like me can do
so much. I can’t. So can’t you
leave me and take
It with you, away
away
away?
No more.

No, more.