by Billy Lambent
Not about you at all
There is a garden without flowers
Where we could have slept together.
Giants there made hairpins out of towers,
And the G train was on time forever.
Like the Dürer print of Adam & Eve
On your bedroom wall: there’s no going back
Is there. No more myth to make you believe
In our dreams–just once, once–not wilting black.
An empty vessel can trace what’s been lost
By the sighs of a goldfinch on its neck.
Our flowers and feathers won’t fade to frost
Even if I don’t land a job in tech.
Our small spring exists forever, somewhere
Unless I’m wrong, and now there’s flowers there.
Snuff film (for Baudelaire)
By a crowd of loose-talkers,
Defile of pickpockets,
With unwilling accomplices,
Only I knew you.
If you were here, I could say
That your game is a light that plays
In the shades of a face that needs you
Better than God.
You live in a multiplication
Of sweet summer mornings,
Unknown to the artist,
His bare feet tickled in lavender.
Instead, let me be:
The fangs to feed from your arteries,
The maggots that manure your meadows,
The nature that takes your light for mine.
All these other guys prey
On instants of incense
To feel calamitous joy,
The sense of which escapes
Between the scalpel,
The easel, & the steeple…
****
Billy Lambent is moving to New York. Read his work in Apcon, Hobart, Burial, Plauge Circus, Spectra & Dreck Lit.