How beautiful, if sorrow had not made
sorrow more beautiful than Beauty�s self.

-John Keats

How your lips decipher the city limits
and display them in a flash across my mind
when we part mouths and say goodbye
is an unfathomable legend of loitering I wish to tell.
The amaretto of last night is jealous
that I can desire your puckering more than its own
that I can forget all worldly intoxications
and become drunk with the full-blown
spirit of being your companion.
I wonder, is this reward worth what is being paid,
my heart being flayed against the Venetians
untouched and unlighted by
your morning-ambitious
digits digging for sunlight
and birdsong beneath the shade?
If only my shirt stayed
on during dreams of you,
erotica would have a new
and more conservative name
and shame on my skin,
the fires would bustle
out of rusty barrels, my being
alone and homeless, a bum
burning rubbish to stay warm,
giving light to the darkish alley.
Please, if begging ever meant anything
other than making wishful our wants
of tomorrow�s weather.
Rip the shingles from my skull
and expose the attic of my brain
cob-webbed and cornered into
nostalgic thoughts of rocking chairs,
and chains made of heavy water
to hold us down like a finished jigsaw puzzle
tired of working to hold together
ready to disassemble, pour back into
the box from which we scattered. Expose
my vestibule of a soul, let it greet you
like a lost cousin from which I was born next to
and lived apart from, knowing only absence
in place of what once felt like family.
Break the door down when I trap myself inside,
bring a battering ram of axe-handled angels
to burn teeth marks through the cedar
brand me saved from myself, forgiven -
made available again to your light.



�2005 by Paul Adrian Mabelis