Work Text:
Upon winsome, manikin'd gentle men, incise my features
To paint the fine bones of my face as I implore of thee—
Is this, a version so bravely hewn, yet allow’d
When to be beautiful is to offend—to be forbidden
This structure doth cast me as lesser a man—a gor’d Adonis
Bleeding whilst one half is a dogged, waxen wraith
Begging for a resurrectionist from the blue river bed—
And the other, lives an ethanol-suspended vivisection
Break splinter’d shafts off beneath flesh, beside tarnish’d organ ichor
Dear faithful Lyceus, with thine archer’s hidden kiss, a haemorrhage
Plac’d festering within each epicene Sebastian, twice beloved and bled
Torso to tongue as we weigh out consequences against disorganis’d hearts
Heed my pleas to carve away the misplac’d parts
Or cauterise, with another bright scar, this foul, belonging-disease
A hypoxic shape so form’d in ruinous error before a soul
Acts this vessel out like a fever’s end until it breaks
Tonight—or Tomorrow, cough up twin coins to pay
A century’s penance to lie with slivers of full-moon-mirrors
Reflecting on the blacken’d backs of mine eyelids
What I will ever be tormented to see, yet never be