I want to remember you like my fingers remember things:
The soft snip of cutting a tendo calcaneus,
Sunlight warming up bitter formaldehyde,
The clean smell of isopropyl alcohol. 
Let’s bring things in a little closer;
A bigger aperture for the dark scene.
Your pupils widen like a camera
And take in a picture of me, delighted.
I smile at you
And feel your skin
(Roses, mint, feathers and forest-y things)
Against mine
(Aloe, metal, sand and desert-y things.)
For you, I want to be all those metaphors they tell you not to use in English class,
Or the juxtaposition of a grasshopper on a canvas shoe.

It doesn’t matter what I am as long as I can make you happy with it. 

things we are going to pretend never happened,
chapter one.

your pupils going wide like undersea lakes, huge and terribly blue;

your eyelashes fluttering like a monarch hatching, careful and shakily new;

chapter two.

the way your fingers found mine with a tentative “i think we should” and an enthusiastic “my dear, i agree”;

the way we ignored everyone for a moment to prove how our world can consist quite fully of simply you and me;

chapter three.

we turned our heads about and found we were in a place of beaming sun;

before we were quite aware of it, something bigger than either of us had already begun.

your knuckles were soft white dandelions when i pressed your hand to my lips

while you burned like a hot coal, your sighs set me alight too

our breath synchronized as i ran my fingers through the copper crown of your hair

i do not know if i want to find out what you taste like

for i fear that if i took a bite i would eat you all up and none of you would remain

i am attracted to beings with noble souls

basking like a desert lizard in the weak newborn spring
enjoying the sun of somewhere else
somewhere else i am someone else’s son
i am happy there (but i don’t know what i’m missing)
love sits in my heart like a heavy dragon
poised to tear me to shreds if i make a wrong move
and someone has carelessly discarded the rules
never have i needed you to clear my path more than now

now what do i learn from this?
o do good things come to good people?
no
bad things come to good people for ma’at is locked in battle with chaos
and chaos is strong
ma’at is the good way
and those blessed by ma’at will prevail through what storms threaten to capsize the life-barge

he carries the look of someone

(the wide brownandblue eyed

fresh faced

take on the world

look of someone)

who has only known for a short time

what kind of man lives under his skin

your tendons

my dear

were the white of a candy cane

and the arteries

under your paper skin

were the reds

i howl
a bitter overcoat in a bitter wind

i need
my Pathlayer’s libraries
great book-rooms
knowledge-brains of djehuty (a name a name a name)
animals reverently kneel and kiss the butcher’s knife
for Him and the pursuit of His Paths
the binding of His books smells sweetly submissive
i am
forbidden
from setting foot in these places
because my keeper, o, my keeper!
ignorance blooms like flowers strewn around corpses
my heart weighs heavy o anpu (a name a name a name)
keep your feather in its scabbard

and i will return to the snow
and the ice
of my homeland
(or more
of the homeland where i am
which is not mine)

we
should stay awake until the godawful hours
i will write poems in margins
and drink bad coffee
maybe smoke
(cloves)
if you like that
i will draw you in gestures
you, your beautiful aura
like
a halo
it is so lovely that it crushes my rose petal chest like a weight