ARIEL BECOMES CONSCIOUS OF HER CAPTIVITY
You are a prosodic ecstasy that flutters away plainly,

like a white pillow pushing past your lips. I have loved

the chimera of eyes and skin that haunts the terrible corners

of this urban hellhole, all for the parameters of your undying

tricuspid valve to swathe and clandestine my guts.

You could not want these physical nothings if you knew them

for what they are so we sip at surface level and burble and smile

and swim. The battery of gracelessness defends my era of complaint

, regret you, temporary elephantine hood. Abstractions lent

by memory shine a wax leather swathing my empathy

to wrong set of brother salts, idiot breath! My meaning is

honesty not service to the politesse embargo dictating

stranded weather and objectifying the colour of hair,

orange gestures and small terrorist cells plotting arson

in Vegas. We promised each other entropy but

defaulted to stress violas ghosting no man’s land.

My riches of you knew no depths but  even as I

dived your waters the oceans stayed soundless, passing

wreckage & vacancy, seabirds choking on fatty glues.

The area I swim in smells of champagne and semen

but where is the captain’s boudoir? Sunset body

crisps space into its hieroglyph: debt mode isn’t working

anymore, not that it ever could, & the void I’m

traversing is a foreign object, not your parabola at all,

in fact I’m tangled in musky plastic on the kitchen

floor. Our breathing apparatus is fucked: mysterious

minerals swarm our throats, language becomes barbed wire.

IloveyouI’msorryIlied all phrases slicing our tongues to

pure phanta of bloody hyperrealism. Taste it: you earned it.

This is what we really wanted.

Love as transaction can’t survive fluctuating

interest rates, spores, shadows alighting in and out of the wreck

which terrify us with fantasies of parental morphing.

Our fountains of blood run silent as we back away

from the other-as-mirror, reflecting, as we forget

the doves who rose on tripod highs to siphon their

late harmonies in currents of quivering air. I know

you’ll skin me alive, perfect this morphine drip running

from the desert and wadding my mouth with a sweetness

thicker than cream and oil and grease and petroleum

bandages masking the mess of my solitude, but my only real wish

is to break the surface in a cloud of dust, a scattering halo,

fomented with the barnacles of my love for you: Bye.