Moon in Aries

 

“I want to have more Chinatown days with you.”

    another bar 

    another Sunday

    and yet 

    another plate of crumbs

 

I’ve been slipping you loaves over the past ten months 

under the love of streetlamp poems 

and pillow talked prayers

You met me in October 

fragile boned broken bellied 

stigmata bruised and beaten 

through the fleshing of both palms

 

Saintly aspirations filled my nights those days

guiding repentant nocturnal sinners

on bloodied bended knees

For love given softly will soften as well

a mythology a fallacy an untruth I believed 

    we grieved

we moaned 

we tangled drunken limbs 

and all the while 

I was in the kitchen

baking bread for you to eat

 

“I want to have more Chinatown days with you.”

 

Your own whiskey words after a month of sanctioned silence

you prepare me another plate of crumbs as if nothing has changed

We made that Canal Street pilgrimage on a mid-March day

after a late-winter morning hiding under navy bedsheets

we talked we didn’t fuck didn’t undress didn’t kiss

just shared skin beneath layers 

of clothed concerted tenderness 

cradling bodies begging to be smoothed

to be held down and embraced

    but we didn’t

    we didn’t

    it would’ve ruined everything

and maybe 

that was the most love

that you were able to offer me