I Could Still Play

My heart should have burst in my chest when she left.
But it didn't. Instead I was stranded in whys,
withering in raw light, starving to hide
in some slash in the sky, in a dent in a pillow of wind.
I blurred myself with venom. Stabbed a fang in my arm
and sailed in the siren silence of anesthetic twilight,
drifting into the shimmering lamps
of her magnetizing eyes: eyes
that seemed to see you: you
wanted to plunge in those flares
and bask forever there.
Anywhere else was a tundra.

I'd wake shivering burning sick and alone.
She smoked in another world,
aloof as a flash in the desert
shadowing everything.
I rarely bathed or ate
—but I could still play.
Weeping stinging stuff on guitar,
with weird warped latenight highway
bluenotes bending into the tailend
of a drunken wedding at the “Morpheus
Hawaiian Hotel”—so I called the mood
I’d find when I twanged those strings alone.
I decided to stay there, although I was eager to go:
it was better than letting my manhood
fade like the kite of her ghost.

So for three shivering burning sunsets
I prayed in that place, slashing the strings
with the raw of my might from the pit of my life,
not stopping until screams of impossible need
and sinister glittering promises
howled themselves down to a hiss
and I stood thin and calm
in a rusty warm dawn,
a scar of a smile
beneath keen glowing eyes,
and hungry to offer
bellowing roses
to the terrible glory of love.



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