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