the night is young

            because your hand is on my knee




                                                                                   resting surely as seventeen conversations


                                                            warble around us.
                                                                                                                                         whose birthday is it anyway?


i’m busy falling in love

with this couple sitting across the table

                                                            waxing on about

                                                                        Gilgamesh, clutching axe and nightshade




                        flailing


	
                                                               frayed		

	
                                                                        at the rim of the forest

                                                                        meeting Enkidu.

		
                                                          and he’s good, Enkidu, but he dies

                                                          and Gilly G wanders the wasteland

                                                                                      baying for his ghost.


	
as i watch you listening

in your eyes we are them

                                                                                                                  but in mine Enkidu’s absence is only his.



	
                             when I look at you

                             I find it hard to remember
           if
                                                 for me




                           we were ever
                                                                                        them.


that we were in a place

where love rang out

and you could not get away from it
                     the back then unseaming the now, our bodies

                     leaching light in unravelled rows 
                                                    the stars falling in dizzy waves

                                                                                        up and up

                                                                                        over

                                                                                        the lip of this world.
could it be i’m still waiting

for the banquet doors to open
                                                                                                     could it be the burnished first look

                                                                                                     at someone hot entering the room




that undoes it all.

                                                      and how the feeling now

                                                                        escapes through the throat,

                   instead gathers all around me like weather.  


in dreams I am a multitude of ghosts

whirring in concentric circles, passing

                  right through your chest like gamma rays



                                                        in attempts to kiss your ashen mouth.	


it’s no use. jagged knife-lust

is replaced by a soft cavernous want

                       not a train slicing itself into the city

                       but a diaphanous ringtone filling the room. 			


i know now,

while your body is turning into tomorrow

            i will remain a speck of dust.

            i will remain containing

                        your offerings and songs 	   		


            and in the quiet of the blue night

            I leave the room, a tomb,

            pass by your solemn body

            resting there, unmoving limbs repeating

            yesterday’s words as iridescence
                        knowing I will miss

                                         the way you hold the light

                                         on your skin                  so effortlessly.


            hence I’m tramping down Parramatta Road

            to seven eleven for a donut, for something sweet,

            and I see lit by block light Gilgamesh, vape-smoke streaming

            out of his mouth, dead and pink and alive.

            he says without words (only the smell of blueberries)
            “When you walk back up the street

            the home you have just left will be cold,

            thick with dust, the bed empty, the room barren.

                        You know this already, so?

                        Want a puff?”


                                                            I’m kissing him to pieces now

                                                            in the curve of a neon glow,

                                                            traffic light leaking onto the side of the road



                                                                      my body lurching, ecstatic,

                                                                      in the blinding brightness

                                                                      of a sugar rush.