it's the vacancy that creeps from your cold eyes

dulling, greying, still sending a tickle
down the front of my excitable spine. it's how you spit and speak
with cloying distinction, till my ears dream and sleep, shutting
vehemently the rest of me away. it's how you arrest me, teasing
and chaining and baiting and hating; i leave, you say goodbye,
and it's lost in the air you breathe.

she still is in you. she is,
she still is in you.

for lin

she is

first rising star on the calendar.
i have the date marked
by my quill, laughing at astronomers.

eyes of violin,
sketched in a pencilled outline
trapped in a silent shadowgraph.

full fingers closing around
the same moon we have howled at
but had underground echoes
thrown back at us.

we are

watching wolves, trailing
cold drops of rain
that are pale and shuddery.

i know where you come from:
somewhere vapid, a vegetable abattoir.

in the mornings
they make you their golden girl, ubiquitous, afloat
in milk-white pools. you soften at the wrong times,
at the ring of a telephone

swish of a newspaper.

cornflake, you slip past my eyes but down my throat.