For Mark
Martyr,
dear muse, your right hemisphere emerged scabbed,
a tight interlocking of dead scar tissue
textured
to a hemorrhage indescribable.
You have earth on your mind.
You appear as death awakened.
Though my oiled fingertips, my digital prints
ache to savour you underneath,
I dare not disturb you into life, nor stir
the casting of your warm golem flesh,
pursed lips and plebeian nose,
nape turned oscillate.
perhaps I derive a basal note-
O, surely it hums with unnatural vitality!
You and I are no more
compacted soil set apart, alone,
while in your igneous basin
vibrates the lowly vibrato of stone.
it is the right that appeals to me,
Whilst from below
your unmaiden form wizens to a tarnished solemnity,
your thoughts protrude
unweeping buboes from your visage-fore,
though by no artistic measure did bone'd fingers raise those cold indented sores.
A face that is unhungry,
paused in marble-top relief
finds a double
in the foliate margins of similar height.
I too am wounded on the right!
I too would protrude,
hideous, malformed, unsmoothed in my etching,
a rendering disparate from castings they make.
As I whisper in your ear do you silently quicken?
Do those utmost molecules begin to mistake
my sounds in the flushing of their own?
You and I, we are a bitter poignancy when the inside gives clue by the out.
Doubt in context, free from frame,
against the bitter whiteness we become
a tyranny of coalescence,
and those who made us,
man by machine by initial vision,
fall away when we stand singular.
No breath, no bone except for stone
no tiding shoulders to shrug the blows
no feet to move from this uncertain sight,
we in repose
with granite lids closed upon untold imaginings.
Yet I imagine my palm atop your conical cranium,
the cool permutation of flesh against skull,
burrowed in the ruddy slivers of
your offset widow's peak.
I would, if allowed,
trace the mineral rivers from occipital to unknit brow
and further.
And would you, of all,
alike as we are,
begrudge me the intimacy of my blind solemn tips,
were I to begin at the nape and linger
at the rose-aligned compass of your lips?
...
...
