Idyllist & Night Mare

AUG 18, 2025

I could have hankered on
to hope for the taste of fresh breath
clinging to your throat like a victim

but asphyxia is maladaptive, so I dreamt of purple skin
the grip of white knuckled anger.

I thought that you had heard my cry for mercy
from a greater distance, inside your cursed chamber
you remembered me

like how the soul may leave the body through the mouth
as if it were something tangible, something we could hold onto
or the desert sand; maybe

I still wish I could ride horses
the way we did when we were kids.

Those years, they’ve all long since
ran off without us now;

into that time, space, fractal—
all our studies of the nebulae
mementoes of our quantum physics

locked in my mind like a cage
for an animal, a beast like the temporal
fragment of memory.

And that smell of an old basement still lingers on
beneath old steps and waysides
in cache impressions;

Do I miss the water,
as would a mother miss a child
who has grown away from home?

Even in messy borders
or the touch that felt like sandpaper;

the voice of a haunted body
showered by the eternal waters
bathed for the dark cloak

laying on its side by the ocean
trying desperately to forget what is embedded
and forged in bliss;

or is it always the grains
of a serrated knife that drift
away from the palm. . .

Deep eater,
if only I held your hand, the reigns
that give me the temporal beast,

one who drifts away like sand
always in the palm, the water, the trail
breathing into the drum of an ear

whispering only of the wild things
I want to hear.

I watch foreign films and think of you
but you are no longer flesh and blood
you are no longer there.

Still, it’s 2009
and you are on a blue bike
telling me your sonnets

the dreams you once held as a child;
watching you cling to innocence

as I’ve dreamt and clung to suffocation,
to the filthy hairs of your filly.