Come in, come in
you seat me next to the kitchen window
I watch you slump and divide
like something I know, I know
broken down the middle like silence
or two halves of the moon
or split-spoke wheels spinning backward
the night I astral hydroplaned your Spider  
you called it ritual sacrifice
at the villa in Corfu your best man-to-be
touching me in the grand hall 
adrift in haze til I woke you
til I folded down like silk 
the gun up to his jaw damned in a trance,
a stranger, the naked blue-veined place, 
eyes turned backward like classroom clocks
the same ruined scene I draw by memory
it comes up to my door with no place to go
clocking the miles and making me pay 
see me, see me 
hold still nobody else 
just a shape and a shape how I know 
what this is, how you return to me. 

 
E. Seraphine 

When you showed me Brooklyn Bridge
    in the morning,
      Ah god,
      light all around you
you raised your eyes and looked at me sharp
“I have visions all the time”

       people rushing to work
       from their nice homes
       clutching their coffees
       nice homes but renting
        anyway

there go the birds
    carte blanche
        nothing can hold you
          dues are paid
      they’ll have to find you
      where they find you

    Mexico City
      turning down
           a whole lot of blow
    too young when your mom
     found you
       on the bathroom floor
    how you told me, so earnest
       and I couldn’t sleep for weeks.

Mad and gifted
    baring your paintings to heaven
        holding the light, the light

drawing me closer, closer
to your chest that scented heaven
    good god,
        like all of heaven
that’s when I taught you tears
    that morning on the bridge
        nobody else
          knew you cried.

Now as a penalty for my skill, by night, I walk in the dead center of my act. If Judas go forth, providing his gifts for the altar, I come with words but no language, giving back all my nine slippery lives. There’s a switch that if you flip can show you more than you ask. Hearing the gruff knocking at the door. Lest out of spite just to come out into the light where God has gone. My brother enters my room. He draws the curtain. “You should get up. Get some air.”  I drag my eyes. Brutal stare at the glare of the day. He hangs over me, crossing into dreams that endow me. “Life is two choices, you know. You can stand roped in the ring. Or you can start to swing.” He lifts me from the bed, through hoops of hazardous half-moons, cyphers from bad oblivion, this plum pool where empires sit smug in my hand. Here becomes there without ceasing to be. He runs the water cold. Cold. How cold it got — silk gown against my skin deepening the chill. But I am not scared, ever, of this gangway that mangles the glee of gods. Let this gaudy miracle happen to me, come out to me like a blistered animal and sink your teeth keen into each brave limb. Head back to heaven, eyes closed, I cry out to a band of angels, fraying at their flawless seams, singing in retrograde symphony: “I beg, I beg, I beg.”