Kolasch.com

Sleeping, must you lie that way?
Stiff and sweating?

The living trope.
It’s rather unnerving.
Are you supposed to resemble
the body’s starched suit?
You swish like a striding
business man’s slacks,
like the sheets of a hospital.

You’ve become even more
inanimate in life,
exuding the whiff of formaldehyde jars
with your exit,
or of dusty chapels.

You will never be satisfying
while you remain alive.

Only that one night,
the knife trembling against your wrist,
tasting blood, did you tease me,
and then, typically,

you stopped short.
(I sigh angrily.)

I was throwing knives in your
kitchen for months. To remind you.

The smell of flowing blood
still clings to you:
stinking odor of breath
and soul—

spurned phantoms.

JKolasch