you who steal the sheets
from my side of the universe
have crept over to crumpled silence
i feel your touch in urban hollows
of heat seeping into my dream
as you hold us over the fire
changing the imprint of time
marshmallow hush
sticky in in my mouth
you neutralize hunger with words
and hide gleaming flakes of ash
under your closed eyelids
heat is madness and drug
so were you, once
always
always we would fall
together or apart
in heat and disarmament
in lazy dreams
driven far away by the
eternal wash of the seas
the lies were old and the truth
was new to us
now you swing
chandelier-bright
above the flames in my head
full of whiskey that distilles life into
handsome lovers, smiling mothers and
unshaven angels of drunkenness
but, oh, i'm sure we're alive
tasting tongues in timeless mortality
lying naked, sheetless and warm
our gapless pulse the simulacrum of eternity
all stars
all halos you
curled under my arm like a seed
and something restless
follows me through sleep
pic taken in a hotel room in paris, summer 1990, poem written around ten years later
