Beauty is Transient in a World of Death
(For Jade Dewitt)

A velvet straightjacket
Locks lies in secret passageways
You could have touched me in my sickness
Where angel insects watch
As I perfect my own special sickness
It took me 25 years to perfect this disease
Built on trackmark holidays
And flower-white china cakes
Broken landfill needle streaks
Where the birds make their own uneasy music
Counted sixteen coins in a red haze
Spots in my eyes that stretched from ground to ceiling
Whiting out my name
On blackbox recorders
Until I cease to be a memory of time and place
Where brutal giant hands
Attach razors to mirrors with chains
And in my dreams I'm dying every time
Seeing my own victories in childhood rhyme
It's not how your heart beats
But that it's always been beating
Keeping your body full of that telling alibi
My words turned to ichor after your last desperate week
The things that haunted you in gray houses
Where smoke masked a sad mistake
It haunts me too
This bathtub form of every collapse
I take jetset voyages to Berlin attractions
Walls falling down to adjust social graces
Heard the curved laughter of your shining embrace
Always a smile and a kind word
Over these stupid words I write
Why couldn't I reach you in exodus castaways?
Why couldn't I turn snow into water for those months?
A secret rose garden filled with diamond cuts
Returning to me like a spider
To hover over my bed
I see chalk outlines around telephone poles
That call I could have made
And the empty sound of punching
Trying to strike my own last resort
Before traffic signals overturn shady trees
In west market rum-running districts
We built a secret carousel for us to ride
And third party play-dates with glass eyes
That unsteady chemical
Making sugar pills to swallow my pride
I see you now through a glass
I see the bottom and then I see your face
I see your wings are delicate
And the gossamer diet of a foraging bird
You rest now like a ghost town
Your heart was sand
And we live on a windy plain
Wanted to cup that black market heart
That never belonged to me
But I know there was a crack there
That carried my name