makes me think
of your head wreathed in horrible flowers –
Then Sinewing their lily way down
To lay Nature’s claim
To your skin.

I seethe violet dreams, I paint germanium paintings
Where I put your limbs at angular
Poses; I make them grin goodbye
With absent elbows
and excessive bones. Even you

can tell it’s wrong.
Dripped with globs
of paint that is red, real red
In the way that pomegranates gloat to wax apples,
the children

Laugh at our chalk odyssey. we etched
On our bodies, aiming for grandeur.
At our caterwauls that shatter
Some old Eden of New York.

We make their new staircases
A peril: Our voices
Rust them.

I would banish children. Evict them.
Leave a city full of ferocious urchins
Bleeding, grasping into some Fagin’s lair
And then they will not disturb
My sleep --

In which I dream the dream of nonsense songs,
Of the poetry you force-fed me.
And when I gagged, my tongue
Folding into a curl
Like a wet oyster in its shell,

You scrawled a scowl upon your lips –
We laughed. We both hated your poetry.
But that’s not enough of a cause
To save this limping love affair
That won’t sit still enough for a likeness.

Little children, little girls, real girls, real blood
That slunk their way across your strutting skin.
I don’t blame children.
They never drew breath
from my breast.

Little children, old women –
My crocus holds back its blood in my time of need
Rather than feel the heat of your discomfort
As it bustles towards me

Trying to look like tragedy
When it smells like
Turpentine.

We can pretend this deserves an elegy
And we can frame it, house it in a gallery
Whose walls are the expanse of the sky and the trees
And the crocus-kissing
Festival of Brooklyn.