Nisus
Note on the subject of the poem: First described as a pair of competitors in the funeral games of Anchises, Nisus and Euryalus were lovers serving under Aeneas as he led the survivors of the Trojan War to the shores of Italy in Vergil’s epic poem, The Aeneid, which described the rise of the Roman race and empire. Clashing with the native Rutulians for control of the land that would become Rome, Nisus and Euryalus died as heroes in a sacrificial mission to wipe out the Rutulians in their sleep. Above all, Vergil emphasized their amor pius, an honorable and amorous devotion to one another that transcended their grave fates. It is said that when they died, the young and beautiful Euryalus first before the strong and virtuous Nisus, their bodies fell together, united by love in death as they were in life.
Scarlet tears fed the water of my baptism
As I fell into your eyes.
Bathed in blood, my nostrils and limbs scarred from the dirty dagger of defeat,
I cast my gelid spectral cloak aside,
Desirous of every glistening diamond upon you,
Youth’s ardent heat coursing through your veins
And thus through my own.
Shattering my heart, I took a shard and struck with the viper’s fury,
Cutting away all that wasn’t you so that
I might gaze upon your wild and winsome form
As it took the soul of Hermes, light, sturdy feet
Tangent with a soul untouchable,
My own forever locked inside the beautiful boy
Already smiling at me from the finish line.
Do you remember that time upon the mountaintop?
Insatiable in the arc of pearls gilded among those soft roses,
Blooming on the cheeks untouched by the rough promises of tomorrow,
You took another cordial shard, the mirror fragment by which I swore,
Gently tearing me apart as you bestowed the ghost’s kiss to a woman
Soon to be bound within shawls of black, promising her the ends of the earth.
I lost myself in our tangled fingers
As we let the grains of salt in the tumultuous waves
Build the unyielding wall before the afterlife,
The whispers of the air echoing your heady declarations
As I watched the cowls of ash polluting the sky, the gods beginning to weep.
Do you remember that time upon the mountaintop?
Sweet crystals of dew marking us with the wealth of two kings,
Laying before our endless kingdom of Latin dust, earthy coins, and noble vines,
Plump, purple pearls upon our necklaces,
Fig juice dripping between our lips as we spoke of love and conquest.
You scared me for the first time after Aeneas left,
When you asked me how to throw a spear,
Watch it glide like the shadowed hawk as it dives for a field-mouse,
Piercing it with boundless talons, the mercy of steel in them.
Phobos wrapped the grating sand of his mist around my mortal heart,
A second from demolition in your august hand, tender,
Able to cast it down with tempestuous paroxysm,
Yet so unbearably genial and pulchritudinous
As it stroked the shaft’s splinter in my weathered palm;
You clung to my hand not like the hawk but like the lover;
I longed to set you free,
Begging you to soar above the clouds
And trail drops of ambrosia along the scarlet petals of your mouth,
Delivering its taste to my grave as your lips danced above my paradise of soil.
Do you remember that time upon the mountaintop?
Sweet crystals of dew marking us with the wealth of two kings,
Laying before our endless kingdom of Latin dust, earthy coins, and noble vines,
Plump, purple pearls hanging luscious above us,
Fig juice dripping between our lips as we spoke of love and conquest.
Why must we have spoken of war,
If love is to be only fairer?
I became you and you became me
As we stalked and slaughtered,
The chance of midnight lavish on the glimmer of our blades in the moonlight,
Selene’s veil trembling well over two pious soldiers
As I lost myself to that which was not us.
In your deadly imitation of every killing stroke, I saw love and fury,
The searing ivory of the brand just across from the nectar of Venus’s quartz foundations.
Its pools burned my hand.
Oh, dear boy, the pride I felt as your hand joined its complement,
Adorning the chestnut crown of curls with the silver prize of our death.
Together clothed in those crimson tendrils that snaked around our bodies,
I felt the eternity of a glacier cripple me, this pain worse when shared.
To no other would I give the final vestiges of the war-drum,
From which you made a lyre.
Hearing your cry so sharp as to cut my veins deeper than the flutes of battle,
Even in death, only your sleep separated us.
All but one of the last fragments lay in the arrows lodged in Rutulian backs and chests,
Devotion my last weapon.
Let me too then join you for a waltz around the stars as I fall beside you.
And so you will awake from the dream of death with the eternal lantern of my kiss
Pain
Smoke I chew
Sings for the trees
If only you knew
My hidden melodies
I kissed your feet of gold,
The dust high in my eye
For the stories I had yet untold,
Lucifer falls from the sky.
Another kick against the grate
More blood drips through,
The broken back now alate
Coagulates hard upon the pew.
Sparks fly from the machine gun mouth
Upper cases hit the tile with a ring and a clatter.
Pretty young pheasants prepare to fly south
I’d tell you my name but it doesn’t really matter.
Gum on the bench
Catches you between realms,
Sick with the foot of trench
Life, it overwhelms.
Hate my own songs,
The bloody Orpheus cries.
Choked in sarongs,
Eurydice dies.
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