I know he is in agony.

I wonder
what he does to assuage the agony,
his life being
so fat and crowded,
his age coursing through him
like a curse.

What does he do,
old man  
at home with his wife and children,
to settle the pain?

Or not at home, further afield
than home - a place I know well
holds it all, watertight
in barrels. His agony. Poured in carefully-measured portions and swallowed
to erase it from his vision.

But there's the tangeable, touchable agony, far too touchable.
Both inside of him and standing
in a skin of her own. The simultaneous pipe-burst of agony,
not compounded but overflowing, impossible to assuage.

(I met you on the night before the eclipse of a full moon,
I asked what you become in the sickened light of a regurgitated sun,
and when the moon blacks out. I knew.)

The cold, incinerating heat he radiates: the white heat clouding his eyes.

A public puppet show,
bobbing to
convince the living he
hadn't died.

Aggression masquerading hot blood with sharp precision.
Smacking against itself, a pulsing void devoid of passion.

The world watched his corpse beat back the earthy sands,
prefering the skin pulled back from his bones
by a bartender's hands. I saw

the fireless smoke
secreted from kisses. Raw
deathlessness, grappling oblivion
in the shadow of the trees which saw
the layers of skin torn from
a being who seemed inanimate.

What heavy light is thrown when the curtain of the moon
is drawn from an eclipse: what he becomes
in the sickened light of a regurgitated sun.

(Things I have known, but can't remember. Nothing more than a gentle shiver
caressing my body in lonely etiolation. The spotlight of my life shines bright to tell you
what lies beyond its vivid edges. A rapist's words for a lover's mouth.
I knew those words

In darkness.)