Bordellos of hues
Vending their rousing palette-hips
To catcalling canvases
For inaccessible hunks of limelight

You were a clutch of Nativities
Of my piney heart

Woebegone rose with her
Convoys of thorns
Soaked by sirens
Assailed by the submersible
Of foam

You were an unfastened cloud
In the sea of fastened people

Cadaver: an inebriated comet
In a copse of corpses that Cerberus ravaged
Cuticle of the star’s dusting and an ivory-fortepiano
That sounded every Sunday in the golden basilica
With Catrina’s silky palms and the gait of chaff,
Bones as if chimes

You were the bloodied-carnation
Boutonnière, clothing the brumal blazer

Tremulous lies upon the Libra
Dusk’s net encapsulated her breasts
Of gavels undulating as carillons

Justice is a shadowy vessel that partitions
Coexisting moths of dreams and diabolic butterflies,
Promulgates silver handcuffs and lesions,
Bestows hitchhikes to Venus’s opaque-amber pendant of
Petitionaries with prodigal bees, sullen bark
Amidst hot hearts and Emmental-soufflé summits

You were the Giaconda
Among comets of unsought hearts

Pathos of seawalls with coral bayonets
Treading on the sea’s brine tunic
As if a dewdrop sedating an aching window

They approach the estuary of padlocks,
Rescinding their keys to unyielding calm:
Coffee-blotches on the papery sky
Whereas the sea was an inkwell,
Infantile pens of tides pacing through
Twilight’s odes to cold anchors, cool scythes,
Disoriented by the sextant of undressing moons

Where only a machete remains
Ensconced on the lowered flag
Of spume upon which my heartland reverberates
In dove-filled reveries, requiems
Full of lightning clashes, funereal christenings
Wakes of impure eyes, conniving mourners

In you, in you, the seam
Of spring coalescing within nascent hyacinths,
Wringing my tarnished soul and spewing caresses as if
Firebirds in the watery necropolis
Of dandelion stamens
Shivering across chaste notches

So long, I existed in your eyes,
Thyme bosom, jasmine pubis
Sweet, sweet stars, high, high tides!
That in those strange, azure,
Noxious twilights when I took my roots
To another’s archipelago of weeping,
The true-earth felt empty, sordid,
Vacated like an inkwell of notions,

Upturned diadems of roundabouts
Aching porticos brimming with vacant souls
Diminutive geysers of fury

And she was unending like the road of basilisks
You were a primordial tree, star-coronet
Fishes of hope entwined in sublime roots
She was but a coat tree,
Who took my overcoats of sorrows
And whom I departed obliviously
In night’s metallic psyche

I hailed a cab to the bleeding moon
But it submerged in your mouth’s quagmire,
In your mound
Of tresses and I walked the milky world:
A vagabond in cardigans of tears
Asking enigmatically all mortal embers
And pious carillons

“Where did she go, abandoned or stolen?”
“Does she belong to another’s circle of arms
Or the flame’s stiff-ring or the moon’s timepieces?”
“Will I love alone in my mantle of blood?”
“Will she be mired in loneliness or mine?”
“Why did she leave me to wander lunacy’s
Crystalline labyrinth, to die, alone in
Snowflakes,
Kilns,
Carousels?”

Only to be resurrected in the homely,
Blue sparks of the rain,
Seeping the torn heart, inebriated bells
Of meteors laden with geodes
That brim with autumnal eyes
Of butterflies

Little antennas
With extinguished hearths
Upon alabaster hills
Where the peasant reaped needles
That sewed our clockwork love
Shut from any kisses,
Caresses,
Waters,
Time,
Beings,
Un-beings,
Ourselves