I was aware of the first one, and so, I never really feared it

Here, with my muscles sweltering, my red roasts of steak for forearms

Taut fabric and light-deprived sleeves surrounding this dinner meat,

Choaked by the brine-soaked linen thread

 

My untrimmed keratin turned into tip-tapping knives,

All while the holy candle spins spools of yarn

Like the half-finished film we once shared,

Which drowns out the second, the third, the fourth

 

The fifth escapes from the priest

And his narrowing esophagus

Where just a kernel of a battle is taking place

With wood pew splinters, dog hair, doctrine, dogma,

And yeasty pollen,

Rising from the long-forgotten bed of fruit ripe enough for its crimson skin

To bleed sugar into its own shadow

 

The sixth twirls around his copper finger and bronzed knuckle

Like our vanishing act that we will never speak of

This church, with aisles of tall robes like long grained rice

Washed and cleansed,

 

And I, imagining the ashy halo released to the sky by gunshot,

And you, with your rose-beige body that once grazed at night

On the translucent, blue-electric cords of my ribcage

 

Even the seventh, with dry-bulging grapes spilling

Atop the red woven tapestry of the tastebuds

Is chewing and yawning, and maybe even safe

Introducing cigar-smoked clouds

 

And still, like the Church’s candle cooled remnants

Conjuring a vague recall

Of your shape on the curtain backdrop of a single night

 

The eighth stage could have been a thousand things,

And now it's none at all

Because you were fisherman,

Cartoonists, cobblers, seamstresses

Or navy-clad mailmen, or even pastel-coated florists

You were the firesparked choir, the robe-donned cardinals

 

And you made me a still-eyed snapper, a melted snowman,

A soleless loafer and a threadbare skirt,

Junk mail and clipped razor petals,

You made me hoarse-voiced, air-stale bread

 

The bellied-up fish, my body tips and turns in this water,

A blue-shadowed child, soon, a pink-born baby