Guide

1.

You’re a strange woman.
You ask me out into the night
and wear your traveling cloak, your foul weather
hat, you pay for bus tickets to take us
across this dark, dry land, you walk
ahead of me.

I’ve seen you before; singing out
the blood in your veins, the wounds in your breasts,
bellowing in pain and anger
at the passerby too stunned
from being alive
to comprehend your dying
over and over again.

Now you call me into this
dark, dry land, you board a train
that chuffs off
some kind of stasis.
And I follow you more with questions than my body,
and you answer sideways, you won’t look back.

Where are you going?
It’s too gray for blood here
and you are far,
far too quiet.


2.

I’ve been here before.
I remember I slid
from sore to sore, in chaos.
Now I’m on a locomotive
tour of demon carcasses;
the horizon separates
black from black; the wan stars sicken -
You take me across no land.


3.

Come on back, love.
This is an expensive habit, this traveling
the spaces between fights and fucks between
conversations between these are the times of my life.
You roam bootless.
At the still point
of the turning of the world,
there is no traveling cloak.
Come back from this deathlessness.