Bang! As it often does,an ego creates a universe of its own
Two: I dreamt your veins last night
They melted like sugar in my mouth
I swore I could feel you warming up to me
Or was that just the afterglow of Vodka making my guts feel pretty?
I promise I didn't mean to wake you
It's just the drunk monsters know your number better than anyone
Three: Are apologies labors of sweat after all?
Should I salt them from my brow and then build us in underwater reef
Or merely admit I'm human and know that's not an excuse?
Just meant to say egotism is an easy tide
And I've never known a shark to be selfless

Four: Stranger,my love went forfeit a long time ago
So don't expect me to spread like some unsteady bridge
When the blade of your tongue cuts the arch of my back
And London falls all around us
I won't rebuild-just lie in ruin
Like the last time he and I made love instead of making peace
He left me sobbing,dripping like a question mark so full of beg
And I still wonder what he knows about drowning & water births
And if he ever found his sea legs
Five: As often as I've gone on vacation,I've witnessed a funeral
Seen women sprint behind coffins breaking a sweat from their eyes
Stood exiled outside a church in Moscow
Caught between a dead man and the door
Trying not to stare at the corpse like a tourist
Every vacation a death,a wake
So anytime I'm tempted to get away with my words I'm reminded
That every poem is a tombstone eulogizing a moment

Six: Our introduction took the shape of a sonnet
I only had ten syllables to learn your name
Didn't bother to tell you mine
Just ended the couplet,signed your slave
The 1st poem I wrote paired fire and desire out of necessity,but between then & now
I have learned a hundred and seventy-three ways to rhyme I love you
Seven: I tried to buy you a phonograph off eBay
That was the easiest way for me to say I'm sorry
That your melody is too classy
Has inspired too many brilliant riffs
For me to try to play it on these accordion fingertips
Your well-composed vinyls too rare to skip
I know I scratched our records
But hopefully they'll just repeat at all the good parts

Eight: I pick up the numbered photographs
Dust huddles on the edge of my fingertips
A family of beloved smear
I blow them gone
Can't help but wonder is this always how love ends
In two dimensions
Nine: An old woman,37 minutes widowed,sits in a room
Both bright and dim at the same time
Repeating in the odd quiet of being married but not
I was young until I was old
How do we stumble upon death? It wasn't there before
And suddenly we find it
Close as a nightstand's edge in the dark

Ten: The future is speculative and I'm tired of trying
To understand everything,I fold the photo album
Like a love letter around 4 years of nostalgia
Dim the reading lights and
Let the joy of never feeling the same way twice
Open me like a novel
Eleventh Hour: One thing I will always know the anatomy of an ache
Absorbing my assailant's archaeology
Allies that angle across that articulate armaments & abandon
Ankles atop adders
All apologies are anti-venom
Ask Alysia about amor
Absolute altruistic amor
Answer: agnostic