Slaughter

I want to write of lambs
and poets obfuscated in words
and love
(the years imagined
now renounced)
I want to write of you
my golden lamb
you I dressed in clumsy seasons
while suns dropped in lazy days
and whispering darkness was a prelude
to a searching, grasping warmth
you
sucking my tongue to the point of pain
and I left voiceless
or rather never found voice enough
to tell you of moldering skeletons
how often the morning birds
would sing us and the skeletons to sleep

I was in the miles driving
and the minutes waiting
to and for you
and you were misspending youth
like I had and am
and no blame could I pour on you
though the jealous part of me
wished to
and wished to frolic always
while I pretended seriousness
and you earnestly irresponsible
forgot me in a chemical dream
one I knew well
I called you with a day-bag full of promises
and hated that you weren't coming
I parceled the poems of others for a gift
and despised the tardiness of the picture
you drew of us with your own hands

my golden lamb
idolized
you were my Christianity
with your curly halo
and sky-god eyes
you were all I knew anymore
you claimed the speckle of my eye
and gave me apprenticeship
to a dead poet
while I strode in confident nudity
from a broken hot tub
to a frigid lake
and clothed in dawn-sparkling droplets
I climbed the stairs
returning to the warmth of you
and venereal laughter
you would have cradled my decomposing skeletons
and grown a garden
but for your prescient paranoia
you knew
ever the black sheep
must be watched lest he wander

moments don't exist anymore
my days are unexamined
as I shoulder forward blindly
escaping the memory of willful wandering
while thinking of my golden lamb
I consumed you with an unseen moment
and I fled from you and me
and from our violence and our endless ramming
I fled from you
into your arms
and being so close you could barely see me
I bit you again
in the able care of shepherds

my golden lamb
your bloody curls stain an empty altar
erected to no one in particular
and I stare at the knife in my hands
and the red dripping wrists
and the sticky warmth
and shout I DON'T KNOW
before throwing old bones as a last defense
I learned this in old books
the favorite lamb is always sacrificed
though I never found out why
even after gutting you