The second, brilliant excerpt from Swear to Me (out Oct 24th).
There are wards in my head where all the well-meaning words went.
There’s straightjacketed sensuality in my stead, intimate shipwrecks, and no treasure could tread water quite the same.
There are padded walls in the place I’m most appalled, where I used to acknowledge
God but thawed
to the thought of it, and bonded with
my ghosts and their dogma
over apples and
anacondas,
Eden to beyond.
There’s a lifetime of therapy and its associated hellspawn inside these hobbled lines, post-suicidal sentiment I consider divine.
When zippers holding
arms together
align, I’m freed from
these testaments,
top drawer consensus where all the pieces that are left of me reside.
