XXXVIII. Riddled With Holes

...
Where's the excited bluster
Of a dangling conversationalist
Who is only alive half the time.
Whom imagination forswore at birth,
(An uninspiring turning point.)
***Who wrote that thing about you that one time
******Who made that thing that looks like anything but you.
***More like him, in fact.

"If anybody could do it***you could."
A thriving indiscretion that has failed—
Normans storming and the Hasty drawbridge failing sort of failure
—to be born out by the evidence.

Where's the follow-through
Of a half-turned lightbulb,
Who told you from the start
Not to pin your hopes on him?
***(Lay them gently,***if you must.)
Who's not responsible
For lost or stolen items.

XLI. Under Sky So Starless

The nap of the blanket rubs against his nose.
****Shit, shit, shit
Instigating, provoking, antagonizing, evoking a sneeze that he stifles quietly
In the gulf between their pillows.
Everything in this room is so goddamned hostile,
Drawing him to open warfare
With this foreign domesticity.
Not a deliberate war,
Or one he'd chosen for himself,
****An emergent property of the wretched necessity
****Of everything that came before.

The dull, incessant
****Scratch, scratch, scratch
Of shifting sheets,
The call-to-arms creak of brass bed-posts,
And the deep yawn of stretching walls.

Please, God,
Keep it down. Please,
God, don't let her wake up.
I'm not ready**** to let go of her hand.