XLII. Role Call

...
You were the first cusp of failure caught and held like a cloud above the sheets.
You were my first How can this not be love?
You were my first disappointed, sympathetic look.
You were my first conditional unconditional drawn taut against a moral plank and snapped to leave a mark upon the great divide that never fell.
You were my first regret. The gateway regret that let in all the regrets that followed.
You were my first intimidation.
You were my first "Let me inspire you" and why do only you get to see above us both?
You were my first terrifying phone call that I would take again tonight and every night for the rest of my life, in bed or Brooklyn or Buckhead.
You were my first apathy. My first nonplussed, unremarkable, even, and I felt it and it shook me and I stared.
You were my first kiss and the first one I'd take back if I could and you grabbed greedily for both all at once.
You were my first broken heart.
You were my first hand-held quivering voice, I promise I can get this out, just wait.
You were the first broken heart I noticed that wasn't mine.
You were my first phone call with my first cell, and you were so many other firsts, that I lost count the only time I ever counted.
You were the first unequivocal mistake I made more than twice.
You were my first friend for life for three or four years.
...

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.

XL. Two to One

You Were
Captivated by all my most banal inadequacies,
Letting the truly telling and irredeemable
Limitations and imperfections
Slip through the fault lines.

I was
Searching for your blue
On moons,
***On mooted metaphors.
For that last blue⎯
That color of breath.
That chromatic drop of a heaving sigh.
That finally gives out
***To a night-long silent black.
Which is still your black.

And mine.

XXXIX. Superman

"I don't believe in Superman,"
She told me, leaning on my armrest.

The stereo was turned low,
The low hum of mumbling static,
The sort of sound you imagine
A trembling cape makes
****Trailing through the clouds.

"Well, what about me," I
Smile and turn and wink.

Her hair was losing its fight
Against itself, against its will,
To stay straight, like an hour ago.
When she had it in the iron,
****Before the curl took over,
********Spiraling down her face.

"You don't believe in Superman, either."
Leaning away, reaching for the stereo.

XXXVII. Untitled

"Hey, do you want to lick the spoon?"
"No."
"Fucking liar."

XXXIV. Thread of Continuity

I'm only me materially,
A self restrained paralytically
In the chemical bonds of a single-serving self.

Stuck in the stillness of a half-mine moment.
Half mine, half the next guise.

Lay me down in scribbled pastures,
Graveyard sheaves of requiscant in pace.
Blown about by an indistinct breeze.