The return of the dispossessed, but with oomph and clattering brio

Two skulls clatter down from a

predestined perch

In the catacombs in Paris

And I think of you and how much

More ink you’ve spilled than

blood you’ve let.

As I confessed the last time

My dour catastrophes unspooled

Across yours,

I am not yet past my spelunking phase

But with compulsive computation

About what might have been

I am fully pierced and run through

I stoop to put these benighted globes

back up to their polite place but

Take no solace and take no prisoners

So I kick them loose into darkness.

I straighten up, standing in an

Enervating memory of

an earlier last time we collided

Into spooky action orbits,

After the suitcase and orange milk crates

And soft recrimination had been stowed,

When I said what you told me were

All the right words

Before telling me that you

Couldn’t any longer see me

as someone who

Could possibly mean them

And then we laughed until it

Hurt differently,

skin flayed and

Brains deleriously broken.

I didn’t have the heart to say that then

but I meant to,

Even though I wouldn’t have known

Whether I meant it until I had

cupped in my soft hands my pallid heart.

I still had the words “faith” and “hope”

and “love”.   Still have, oddly.

But the nervy pluck to act,

Rather than to apostrophize,

has always been

Just beyond me.

I never saw you as just a reticent vessel

and

You never saw me as just bread crumbs

Strewn on a path away

from pitiless locked-in confinement.

It worked for awhile,

our mutually respectful solitude

Masked as cohabitation

With intermittent fucking,

Drifting through the age

of wire and string.

Sharing in the idea that gold seams

can put broken vases

into wholeness,

we traced those maladies together

and without too much confluential jest,

Sprinkling just enough of

the categorically interesting to save room

for the zany paranoia

which eventually might overcome

the christening guilt.

This goal without a plan is a penny thrown

Down a depthless well, and knowing that

It will never reach you because I will

Never hit send is just another erratic

Exculpating line,

Just another earnest hand held out

In empty space,

waiting to be read out loud

These caves of the dead

ache with echoes

And I don’t know how much yield

The quarries have in the offing or

How much more play in the joints

the uses of enchantment

Have left.

But so I won’t pretend to forestall

The delamination further

It won’t do to deny that two plus two

Is not what we are here for,

Because what we are here for

depends upon more than what

our hatched dependents,

reaching for the blue sky,

can possibly grasp.  

This is what excess running amuck is for.

And, unless I’m behind on all things you,

The one thing we still share

is having no one

reach or grasp

On our behalf once we go.