Dear girl with the withered lips:
your bed belongs to a doll’s house,
creaks like a casket
while my love sprawls you against the cloth
like a pinned butterfly—
a wilted symmetry of something lost.
You should know the sheets smell
like another poet’s stale vermouth and dust.
Did he spend seven empty stanzas
undressing you of jaded stars?
He made you into something
when you’re nothing at all, nothing
without your closet of curiosities
to hide the shimmer left of youth,
the soft skin that measures time
like the oscillations of a stone,
waiting to ring one day
just to say that too much time has passed.
You’re a gray-haired child,
but I got a little extra love
to get some thirst in your soul—
the kind that ruins you
cause you can’t get your fix
from sheltered boys—
the kind that wakes the dead
with your desperate moans,
begging for my gin.
Dry spell’s ending soon.
It’s going to thunder when it does.