Morbidezza
Bliss and shiver, swoon and rapture, words you gave me from very far away in my mind, watching you quietly reading Baudelaire. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ You move in a world of pink butterflies and pink roses. Mauve clouds, edged in gold, pass over you in states of unbelieving raptus. Such softness and delicacy have never existed before in this harshed place. You are satin, and dove coos, and the finest of rains falling down these gentle days of dream. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ At times, sweetness returns. peach's juice, the opium of winter nights, poems in a glaze of amber, your skin in its drunken whiteness, smelling of frankincense and dead roses. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Cats prowl the world in the dark stillness beyond this lamp. To think of you naked in this dotage is madness. To not think of you is despair. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ taste blood and mint in your deepest kisses and under your tongue a silver petal of vodka lingers. I drink you drop by drop, so slowly that sobriety can never penetrate my cocoon of lily-sighs and velvet pillows. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Every minute is a spire of thought shooting into a world of shadows where your thighs blossom and dissolve in a cloud of lavendar. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Grey day, white parasol, your pink stilettoes. The scent of rain and rotting apples. Your delicacy like ice, beyond lace, beyond life. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Your pallor is the aesthetic that inspires and corrupts my poetry with the narcotic phantasms of long ago laudanum and absinthe binges. A thousand black candles all melt to create this mirror in which your face floats, in the splendor of a lingering suicidal neurosis. Your pallor is my anesthetic, numbing me with the bliss of orgasm deep inside the stillness of your swoon. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Among these crystalline flowers a blue dragonfly sleeps. The world is transparent pink and gold. Your misty gown burns up the days like cinnamon and your body's hot snow. I wander delirious with your image where the chimera lifts it's head to catch the honey dripping from combs of light. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ You are sublime rising over me like the white succubus of Eden, lying in wait for the saints, your legs opening to drown me in a sky of pink roses, your wings beating like a golden wasp in a frenzy, to dust me with all the sins of the angels. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ am ashen beneath your lips. I am waxen under your body's flame. I am dried roses falling from your hair onto the snow's ultimate silence. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Awash in this silver of paper and breath, time and candlelight, ghost moon, rose marble, lullabye of doves, your breast in a velvet room. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Your throat is a fountain of ether and blood. Lilies are everywhere, golden, white, and scarlet. Silver ash falls from a moon of hashish and alabaster. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Your body is covered in poison, the pierrot's mauve powders that I lick, insatiable as a cat drinking the moonlight. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ In this world of green velvet and gilded glass, I wander with you along the frozen canals of stone cities, past the leaded windows, the violet sighs, the orchids of snow. I'll die here, in these grey dream-silences, under moons of ice, holding on to your voluptuous hothouse body. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The lilies are black under a black moon. Your tears are black pearls falling from black eyes onto the black pages of a suicide's note. Your black panties keep hidden the sexual secrets of the alchemists. My golden poems all turn black as you sit undisturbed, painting your nails and drinking a cold black wine. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ You are that abandoned city of mannequins staring blankly into the eternal twilight of its fogs. At every intersection there is a glass coffin, where you lie in perfect beauty, lids closed in a blue poppy sleep from which you will never waken. My soul wanders there, like a great moth beating its wings to shreds, drunken on the glow of your dead flesh. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Snow, black clouds, grey flowers, the light's golden sugar. Your body' s white cross, onto which I am nailed. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I pick things up off the pavements for you: pieces of marble, the breath of dying birds, silk gloves, the lilyshaped moonlit fragments of dreams and poems, echoes of the snow's raptures, the porcelain faces of ballerinas. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ In amethyst evenings you stretch like a cat as I unroll your stockings. Your skin is rose-peach, light under water, mist and porcelain - the stillness after the rain, between worlds, when all the petals fall back to sleep. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Your voice is dew falling from a blade of grass, the silver of a distant star reflected in an ivory-framed hand mil the slide of tiny pearls down a strand of pink thread, the phosphor of microscopic crystals unearthed from your breath. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Samite and moire; crushed velvet in your hands, the white lattice of your sighs; moonstone, moonflower, moonfire; words themselves your musicbox. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ All the alphabets of violet, pink, and mauve abide in your unbearably pale skin. Your absoluteness remains in the scarlet marble and the scarlet gossamer of this final cup of wine.