The Booze Talking

Blame it on the booze for
merging your face in hers.
Given the general slurry
of those pouring nights,
such confusions weren’t
surprising, though you
nor she nor I have since
forgiven me. She
stepped off one nights’s
wave of alcoholic sleaze
and then we found ourselves
in a room where dawn’s
pale mordents were
streaming through every
blue window. Yowza the heat
I felt in her when she
unzipped and wrapped
her soft legs around
my hips, her loins
as hot and moist as
my name which
tore from her lips as
she came again and
again, my full weight
and fullness plowing
and plunging & plundering
her with an empty
heart’s naked greed.
Afterward we were two
strangers deep in love
with nary a clue how to
proceed beyond that
apple-isle’s wave-tossed
bed. Not me, at least,
and of her own fall
what can I say? I loved
her too much to grant
her mortal falter, and so
was like a stag in the
headlights of approaching
doom. The same mouth
that sucked me dry
& whispered how she
wanted all my children
spoke all the later words
of bile and choler and
oh-so-blue-rue. How could
such magnificent breasts
be rounded with that
boredom she eventually
felt with me, pointing
them on toward the next
more manly man? And
so when all those hurts
invaded me, descending
wraith-like from the moon
to fever my brain, I knew
the daily barbs and ice
which was breaking us
back in two were the
fault of my own fool’s
equipage in the wiser
ways of love. What could
I really say to her when
my tongue was inked
in your pure honey?
Always in that awful clinch
where love in real
lovers is daily made
I’ve quailed, my
equipage both
insufficient and too
gossamer, tooled to you
who beamed that sickly
aura behind every
woman that I’ve loved.
How many loves have
ebbed from the women
I’ve loved because I
didn’t fight with them?
As if a marriage rode
on a husband’s willingness
to defy and even curse you
in some real love’s darker
name. Sorry Charley,
my history’s assembled
feline choir hymns,
we don’t want tuna
with good taste, we
need a fish to whup
some ass. That feral
dolphin which the
naked man rides upon
my father’s family
crest ain’t no lap-puppy.
But when will I
ever learn to lose
you in my heart?
Back to my story --
and when those
soaring soggy spumes of
love had ebbed in a
collapse of closing doors,
how I mooned for her
and you in the you-in-her
of iced vodka’s slurry
drowse. I was like
a man tossed from the
sea and exiled on
a bitter shore where
all my fellow drowned
Jolly Rogers assembled
at the bar to drink
all night and stare
at their reflections
across the bar, repeating
the words we could or
should have said
to keep you-in-her
from sailing forever away.
But it was just the
booze talking, speaking
loud to no one the
awful secret you hold
like a finger to our lips.
Who do we love anyway,
and what is it that we
greet when all the sheets
have been torn from
that infernal book
on which we bed all dreams?
Beyond the heart’s thalassa
is this discriminating rage,
a will to fight to the
end of all poems,
making certain things
at last clear and clean.
Not by your providence
but my victory, dread queen,
will I ink that page at last.
Beyond your dread similitudes
are seas without a same
and salt in sheer infinitude
and feelings you’ll never fully name
no matter how much booze
it took to drink before
my you-in-her was weaned.