an illusion grasping a futility

she likes to roll
her skirts at the waist
around her hips
a scarfy bundle. belly shirt
exposing flesh a shade
above ample, stretch
marked, slackening.
but the legs still work.

he likes his women
thin, reedy, shorter
than her legs.


*



she has to rise each morning
at four, the pain insists.

sometimes while the meds
and the walking kick in
the fifty squats over the blue
ball, the bowl or five, the ibu
or vicodin on the weekends
she will cry. wish for a gun, get
inside the pain he lives with
it must be like this the symptoms
are the same , vomit the fight
out of her back, put it in the walls
or the cat or the inside of his warm
hands. the way fucking becomes
a wobble board, spinal fluid therapy.
she understands, in a vague way
his desire but it has little
to do with hers.
a wake fasting in the river
a woke for the first time
he does not dream he dreams he dreams
of bardot and camelot, power
its uses and chains.  yanging
agong with the rapture.










*





hephestus raises the hammer, triceps
outlined in red from the flame and black
from the night. a bold strike on a metal bar.
he isn't making, he's hammering
his lameness, his father's laughter, his mother's
despair, his lover's betrayals on a bar of platinum.
the schematic is  in his heart.

he puts the rod into the fire again, heaving
from the workout. his body glistens, a ruby
in the furnace's glow. his face is a picadored
toro. he pulls the rod from the fire again and again
pounding, snarling, weaving/bobbing
at el traje de luces on the breast of the cosmos.










*&






there are times 
she looks at him fresh
from the open
fields of her mind
when she appears a
total dork. stringy
hair, blank faced, down
syndrome mouth.  he
recoils then recoils from
the recoil and wants to understand
how that can inspire desire.
how what he reads comes from this vessel.









*








hephaestus has made a blade.
there was no other form it could take.
its edge is neutrino wide, a whisper
of destruction, black hole fine. he points it
at his anvil, a nick in the surface, delicately
shaves a groove into the side with a slight
wrist motion. where shall he lay it ?
in a case of glass. where shall he find that?
he buries it in the sand in his workshop floor
leaves  to find a glassblower.