This stoppage pushes beyond the bounds of writers
block
Breath's very passage hostage-held by your cruel fiat
You have chosen to renounce me
not for another
but to make sail under enemy colors
mercenary
in
a war created by and for
the
very tyrants you claim to disdain
When I with tentative
shame-faced awe and shock
confide in friends
that in a week or two
you will be leaving for Iraq
they look embarrassed
cannot fathom why
I concern myself with a man like you
Nor can I myself esteem myself a righteous woman
to care
as I do
knowing full well
that
a never-to-be-sated secret hatred illuminates your dark way
to
unsanctified doomsday
that
you are hoping against hope joining jingoists in unholy battle
may
wrench you from the suffocation of ennui
halt
the scratching screech of failure
shame
your children into honoring their father
replenish
venom to a milked bewildered snake
Despite your years Darling
you'll win no ribbons for wisdom
Because of all I know my woman's
heart not broken though insulted and annoyed
beats slow
a brake upon my womanly urge to birth a manifesto
to denounce you
All I wanted was your freckled biceps
hazel guarded eyes
scientist's intellect
twinship with your poet's speech
Instead I found myself
confined death-camped skin-flayed sadistically
slashed
fucked in a way I had neither anticipated nor desired
You will leave I will keep up pretence of relief
in release from your boot in my face
I will say there is no news of you and that no news of you is good news
for me
But as your absence waxes my distance from that
fine and private
narrow-bedded single grave will wane
I Cinderella'd
enjoyed royalblueblanketed invitations to midnights
girlish you called me quivering in your antique
white-canopied bed caught between
the pincers of your weathered lean patrician limbs
pounding feet conscienceless fingers demanding
teeth startling hipbones
my breasts transfused for your motherless thirst
my cries served up for your orphan's hunger
my small fists pummeling your concave belly into potency
I will surrender to time and age
from which your reckless spirit beckoned bright harbor
peerless
in our staying powers
eternal
children sailing under fat summer's night green moon sway
My essence siphoned off to fuel your flight
will not likely effervesce that way again
