— for Beth
Two voices, left / right columns. Poem should be read left to right; in performance, the first and last words of each line overlap the last and first words of the corresponding line in their twin column, effecting an overlap of echoes and imagery.
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Lady Delilah of the scent of sperm or of apricots the moon carries your candle as dawn scissors forth, splaying threads of gossamer light your love burns as it blinds your pallor as full as the moon’s |
Personal Persephone brain scent of apricot and smoke candling your eyes in orange hues as dusk abducts the day threadlight dividing night from day your love here beheld as passive like the moon you flower
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Mirror / Mirror, eyeing me gently Contrasexual Soul Reflection idea converted from emotion you recede like an eyechart but as the room lightens the sharpest features of my face recalled from the eyes’ corners |
Lady Penelope Suprasexual Soul Lover from the womb of twin ideals like eye characters, you approach while the room darkens your signature bleeding water from your isle of oceans |
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Always hazy to the mind impossible to understand stripped of identity amidst the light of all facts with too much of this as impossible to suspend as in too deep, so seeing it through |
Difficult to comprehend deviant to the rationale and riddled into mystery contradictions alight in flight and not enough of that a house of cards under water we separate only when collapsing |
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Here you are, turned and turning fleshed from sweat, now from dance a splash of hair against first light threads of gossamer pirouetting now in the closet of my arms heart pumping air to its own rhythm clutching back to back, necks turned |
Body warm and warming conjured and summoned in dance hips thrashing in the nude dusk spiraling face down to face away from the wrap of my arms flesh sensitive as a shroud breathing kissing me obscenely |
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An attraction, not distraction of a sentience too
sensitive for clarity smoke that draws its own
flame |
Distraction cutting me with passion this incest of soul eclipsing flesh straw drawing from both ends snake mouthing its own rattle trails of smoke pirouetting to dance loneliness no one can imagine or survive to know oneself is beyond all |
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Love of gods smolder at
fingertips to see the pain sheered through lights to which the mind forks open to a greening field
certainty of home |
Moon as a hole into another room between two darknesses, two lights a yearning shaking the flesh with hope |
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--- Chris Custer