Another vagary

Open wide your snaky mouth
that I might examine these healthy rows of fangs.
What’s this? An abscess?
No, it is a limp fragment of pulverized heart
that you failed to remove
in your frequent oral ablutions.
I have warned you before of the dangers of
gargling with blood,
rinsing with bile,
prewhitening with that powder of agony and bones,
I have cautioned you about flossing with the corpses of children.

You listened not, and here is the problem , my dear.
Within your slimy maw
an Auschwitz in an ivory tower
amidst the tottering piles of husks and carapaces
licked clean by the lethal proboscis
that you hide beneath your fetid beak,
the souls of your victims have emerged, melded with violent lavas
and they are drilling into your cruel jaw.

Alas,
thieves have stolen all my anesthesia. Suffer, then.

Lorelethal

Your whale song calls me, guileful siren.

I follow, for you bless me with your hurricanes.

Your tiny starfish swaddle my body

and I navigate towards you through your liquid hymns.

You conjure the whitest of pearls for me to light my path.

Your sea monsters weave tunics for those who drowned in honor of our love.

I lift this chalice and drink as you command,

swallowing the broth you have brewed from

the impossible tears of the plankton,

the squid’s mournful ink,

the blood of dead sailors.

I arrive, and begin to dig for you,

yet I discover

as I carve canyons and abysses in my frantic search

that you have left a only a phantom in your stead on this holy island.

Its laughter incinerates my fragile skin.

And now, from a killing distance,

from an unreachable point in your impenetrable, poisonous sea,

you watch and cruelly order your tides home.

In this, your inexorable desert,

your eyes parch me,

as slow as Chinese water.

Your glance desiccates my blood,

leaving four withered chambers

pumping red sawdust.

Arid Medusa,

In your loveless drought

I dry and turn to sand.

Aortic Dross

Your blue eyes, thieves,
kidnappers of all the oceans, all the seas,
beckoned to me, and willingly I came to drink.

My heart swallowed your liquids gently.
Then, intoxicated by the first and last drops,
it sucked in countless gallons
yet remained parched
and yearned, mourned for more of your loving waters.
Its thirst was a scream
of the purest agony
that caused the stars to quake,
that made the orcas quiver,
that forced the gods to quarrel
and you withheld your moisture.

To summon back your narcotic floods,
I convened my mystics
and compelled them to erase time and my misdeeds,
to mutter their most colossal hexes
so that you could synchronize your watch with mine
and blot away the months when we could not love.

Their incantations were useless
against this cruel chronology,
when monsters entered our bed and bloodstreams
when demons wriggled into the tiny cracks between us
and turned them into chasms and canyons
with their wicked bulldozers
when a diamond-hard grief came to dwell in my soul
when regret and discomfort arrived to plunder
with their merciless, bottomless robber-bags
when an uninvited executioner came with his filthy axe
and split our hearts apart.

We ended, as was destined.
The magicians had to fail.
Your talisman,
Your mighty will,
tempered in a holy forge
made of the strongest steel, never tin,
was more powerful than their tsunamis
that could not breed forgetfulness nor bend time
nor distill the venoms from my mind.
In an explosion your tremendous heart repelled my spells
spitting out the acids that had leaked onto you
from my toxic, horrible love
freeing you from this death chamber.

Yet each night,
I stand vigil on this useless battlefield
this empty war zone I made alone
and I wait
until the moon brings your reflection to my shield

and bending, praying,
I wash your scars with my tears
and hold high two lanterns,
one, in vain;
the other illuminates my sins.