--- A N D Y   M O R G A N

I was breathing ocean as the mistress snorted,
the idle blight of raspy linen splitting lips
as a tendril of weather stretched our skin:
"There’s little more than simony between us."

We were transparent together,
as still as worms: those which dirt.
I wasn’t a stork, but a Cardinal,
a foolish excuse for enough
cleaning the pool with a whip.
She was the Robert Campin of the Aborigines,
the malformed lip of a smothered child.
Together we were left handed,
(futhark runes touching only at corners)
our love life as seeded
as a heart-burst at twelve.

I walked cement, shoring the shore
with a bit of a limerick before
her shattered gait tendriled an eddy.
It was her gaze that gutted me:
crucifix scented and buttering dawn.
We’d accomplished a facsimile,
nothing more.
There were cadences undecreed,
religious disclosures yet to be produced.
It wasn’t like we were elderly:
there was present still a giddy love of fucking.
"Yet we shimmer like a summer lake,
I yakked indiscriminate and, forgive me,
without a thought of the kids:
the springtime’s best for them,
as we’ve discussed, but what of Audrey,
the winter’s lot, who’s pastels
shimmer with the tweed of an umbilical?"