Finally, it all comes together.

I am a small boy
whose heart burns from all the cigarettes that have been dropped into his stomach.
If I could be human with you, I would.
If I could be faithful for you, I would.
I have eyes like two-dimensional comic book windows,
and resort to wishing on worlds when the sky runs out of stars.
The grown men talk so loudly of the outside world,
speak so quickly in a language so foreign to me.
Hair floods over my mother's temples as a curtain.
"Take me by my human wrists," she says,
"and put me to music. Because the failing chalk-dust skin around my hands turns into sonnets."

The lemon-souled goddess of the coming night rips through the papers
on which I've inscribed my name.
(Whichever name it may be.)
The ghost stories were always the best, but she does not tell them anymore.
The lace-mouthed damsel has holes in her eyes,
and blinks only to her creator, mindless mister of the melting moonfall is he;
the small boy who marries his pens and makes brainchildren with them.
Pale and sideways, sickly visions entwine and repeat,
are real and then are not.

A small boy of twenty, forty-seven, eighty-three,
I will dress the way I always have,
in my mother's hands, layered in imagination,
adequately prepared for some storm.
She spins me so quickly on my chair that smoke rises out of my nostrils
and words create themselves out of my hands.
It is a solitary vision, now.

A lover breaks bread, breaks down, breaks into your most repressed goings-on.
A lover who can whistle out your favorite work of art.
She is me as well.
I invented her and trapped her in my wardrobe.
And she screams love, love, love through my fingertips, through my nails,
but her ears are stronger than her voice.
She is understanding if not patient.
All is always well in the thunder that never appears.
Through the hole in the mesh of a net wall that distinguishes us from our surroundings.
I am not my surroundings.
My fellow men are physiologists in thick blueblack cloths
that drape us over and mesh us.
All into one life.

I am the small boy who sinks with the sun.