I
You knew me as Attila,
the empiricist,
the corporeally ensconced
Epicurean, filling myself
with silly mathematics
dirty fucking sophists
you were convinced of my position
when I squinted at you
in ambivalent disbelief for
bringing me a flower incongruous
with the pattern on your skirt
slutty witch-docteress
after surviving a plane crash,
unharmed, however, I have
gained a reverence for
the controlled predictability
of particular phenomenal pleasures
spoon-bending misanthrope
but, because I already
feel adept at un-collapsing,
I helplessly regret
the mellow and careless means
with which I held your fragile self
they say clairvoyants cannot truly love
II
My Dearest Samuel,
The God of my gods is crestfallen, for he has cleaved in two his sons
and now I have no prayer outside of you. I have been crying, guiding not my pen.
My hands are numb enough to be cut off. I had seen romance and commitment at
the bloody spit inside of skulls—though now I cannot recognize my teeth. Have we
not both undead lovers? Only yours, however, seems of Hell.
Love forever, in the darkness,
Sylvia
III
Last night I ejaculated
On an ugly woman’s
Victorian pillow
Fuck you feathers
IV
I love you
She murmured
One hand
Trembling
In the wind
The other open
Facing skyward
And in bloom
Reddening
And wanting to
Be filled
It’s not important
How she died
But that the
Pallid wilting of her
Fingertips
Sufficed to shake
My face of
Sap and grain
To loose my tongue
And move
I love you too
V
I was once in an affair
With a despondent physicist
Who specialized in motion study
So she told me calm and coldly
You should lose yourself much less here
Take your next orgasm as
A cliff, rather than horizon—
To be measured, not predicted
And so I climb with fingertips
Crystalized in rotten hazel
Turpentine on my eyelashes
Pine tar smeared across my chest
Bits of sour bark and algae
Dripping from my bloated tongue
I advanced where darkness broods
To stand nude on a precipice
And shout down for affirmation
Behold the sky has fallen twice
