as usual
beauty eludes me completely
yet i taste it
at the edge of my consciousness
and dream i am drinking it
though whether wine or hemlock
i am still unsure
with its bittersweet prickles
against my skin
and caressing tenderness
i suspect is the prelude
to proclamations of desire
i will never return
you walk on streets
populated by men
seeming as trees
but plundering your depths
with glances different only in their trapped rapelessness
from those of their mousterian precursors
yet your footsteps pause
not an instant
as the gauntlet is neither thrown
down nor unknown to you
i stare shocked
an interloper
confused by the language swirling
in the nearly-darkness
while crazed desperation meets obsessive hatred
in an instant
and jealousy dies fiery deaths
and ice-daggers
only barely managed to remain veiled
behind the moonlight
yet sidewalks don’t open to swallow them
across styx’ currents
perhaps it is me
who has already left this world
or never once entered it
if my delusions of friendship
taste only of smiles
and shadows of aesthetics
while swirling around me
are scents of pheromones
and ownership at one phallus’ removed
and bodies become instruments of torture
only in my fractured dreams