Exhale And Inhale

Exhale and Inhale

This black bakelite madrigal will sing no more.
Poised on three-legged pedestal
it holds an altared place within my strange abandonment
and here on the fog-bound exile westward procession
I wait your call, infinitely.

Yesterday's urgent challenges defeat me with simple implacability.
I swirl drunkenly across a pigeon-toed sidewalk and sing
my heated breaths in undertones of effort. Cruising the shops
of lower Clement I searched for just the thing to give to you
so you would know my love without knowing how much.

So tiresome newspaper piles rot upon my porch and I wonder
where the point of vanishing can truly lead.

Can you see the missing underwear I hold and sickly cherish
so that you will never leave? Can you feel the hold I place upon
the ether as I spin my loose-laced web of calling and pretend it
is merely a dream-catcher. I know there hides a choice. Denied,
it festers in a pool I will not drain. Wistfully, I make the bed.

Stuart Andrew Marshall Tanner