Toothless Gums

I feel your image crumbling into nothing

Your perfume begins to smell like softened yams and charcoal stout

Falling off the bed rail like a smoke ring snuffed

The garden on your back the flowers I waited decades

Withered lilac petals and the dove flies with the owl

I want you to be more serious

Feathers bust out the pillow painted black in raven laughs

Burlesque sideshow and I will never know

How you can be so god damn solid

Impenetrable feelings like every woman I have ever loved

Vulnerability is the dirtiest word

Open my jaw and bite the concrete step upon my skull

Knock the rest of my teeth out; I’ll go find my dentures again

Like in high school and remember where trying gets me

Unable to chew, stick to soups and oozed foods with gravy

Bent straws and cold, ignore the microwave, ovens never warm

Except for miracles and praying for you to be one

Smelling the frosted den of leaves and starch and I am dying

Hoping for a restart in the parade of a parking lot gawkers

Living for a barter of now or never

Giving a heart like a hand grenade pulled the plug

Chucked into the chasm and done

Words and blood flung like bare human shrapnel

Wanting to be wanted like a migratory pattern

Returning on instinct, spiritual intuition or damn dead stupidity

Running right into the buzz saw of you staring at me like a god damn psychopath

Bleeding kindness like I am the one with the hurtful tones

As if the whole world is empowered by the one who can hold out the longest

Make the other flinch, the other want, so the victor can be impregnable

Wanting nothing, needing nothing, swimming in the adulation of dance halls

And internet clicks thinking life is encapsulated in this fallow wafts of sunshine

To a bird on a wire always flying off

Idiots like me praying to just sit down and talk for a while