Lecher

Contraction with night,
Then the minimized distance of vision, the
Closeness of the dark shell.
The world shrinks to infancy as
My body practices a crooked adulthood.

O cocoon 
Of limbs, you make no spark, you meet
No struggle in such an absence.
I stoke the hot blackness, pinching glass.
A channel. Crammed within the confines of a
Pearl, lustrous and bulging –
Layer by layer by layer – 
There is no between between us anymore,
Whoever you are.

Fog rolls in its cage of clarity, its cage of salts, 
No longer wildly floating its skirt over grasses.
A captive springs at its single leak, an 
Errant train slips into its resented home.

I know well the silvery sweat that
Roosts on your brow,
The mercury on the mantle.
It drips to my skin, an infected baptism – 
It pools in my navel, the reservoir of forgetting.

I will not know you in the morning
After I slink back, a blood red beggar,
Into my mother’s womb,
Into the clutch of a different kind of bone. 

© 2017 BENJAMIN SMITH