The Book of Daniel

These poems aren’t really about a person. They’re about metaphor, repetition, and the need to name what won’t hold still. They were quicker to write than he’ll be to stop showing up in everything I do.

I. Etude for a Man

You were tuned in A440,

but your laugh cracked the scale.

I have loved you louder than tectonics,

cleaner than salt,

stranger than the dreams beetles have

when they sleep in cello cases.

***

You walk like an unfinished sentence —

punctuation waiting to fall off the edge.

Your fingers are cathedral thieves,

lifting secrets from every ivory key

and slipping them into your coat

with the grace of old espionage.

***

You bribe children with banana chips

because you believe even joy must be negotiated.

You carry a ledger in your coat pocket —

spider legs, wax teeth,

a pluot with a bite gone missing,

my name written backwards on a bus transfer.

***

Your face is the sun,

but the kind that blinds satellites.

Your voice —

an illegal stimulant they haven’t named yet.

***

I hear it and forget my passwords.

My spine becomes theoretical.

You are afraid you won’t succeed.

Darling, you’ve already failed spectacularly:

I am here,

and I love you more than any planet loves its tides.

You analyze my affection like a piano technician

turning the pin, just one degree —

waiting for the steel to snap,

or hold.

***

When you write,

your words tap out Morse code to extinct birds.

Your poems arrive folded into the corners of my sleep,

stitched into the lining of every silence.

***

The ones God left out.

I once prayed in your direction

and the statues cracked.

Rats poured out singing your middle name.

***

Your grief catalog is immaculate.

Rare. Laminated. Smelling faintly of rain and hospital light.

You don’t show it.

You lend it out quietly —

each ache signed for

in triplicate.

***

The world may never give you a standing ovation,

but I will sit in every broken seat,

clap until my fingers dislocate,

and bleed you an encore.

II. Cathedral and Crypt

You play piano like an exorcist in velvet,

key by reluctant key —

coaxing Bach’s spine from the soil

to whisper a blasphemy.

***

Your voice is cathedral light through shattered glass,

if the glass were stained with blood

and the sun were dying out by choice.

I love you like arsenic sealed in a velvet reliquary.

***

Like a funeral rehearsed since girlhood.

Like a spider biting the chalice mid-blessing.

You walk your nieces through the park

like a fallen god in hiding —

luring them with snake songs

because even innocence demands a currency exchange.

***

Your face is a reliquary:

inside, a saint’s tooth,

a grain of static,

and a flicker from the moment

the world first cracked open —

young, clean, and already rotting.

***

You are beautiful the way

a grave is mathematically perfect.

You are terrified the way

a poet checks the gas line twice,

then lights the match anyway.

***

You write poems

like embalmed lullabies —

stitched into the tongues of taxidermy birds,

or carved in menstrual blood

on the walls of public restrooms

by girls named Persephone.

***

And I?

I love you like a mirror loves the dark.

Like Sylvia loved the oven.

Like mourning in lipstick

dancing barefoot on marble tombs.

***

God watches,

but His mouth is sewn shut with fishing wire.

***

The glacier calved your name —

I caught it in my hands,

sharp, impossible,

melting.

***

Darling, the rats have learned harmony.

The statue bleeds light through its cracks.

And I am dancing barefoot

through the altar you shattered,

singing your name in broken Latin.

III. For the Thing That Burns and Smiles

There is something

I never named.

But I tasted it.

It lives

where your molars remember sorrow —

sharp. white. precise.

***

I loved it

like people love cocaine.

Or cigarettes.

Or bad gods.

With a twitch in the wrist.

With the certainty

that something

was being traded.

(Not a fair deal.)

***

It walks like a sonnet

buried alive.

It laughs like a fuse.

It wears politeness

like a bruise

beneath piano wire

and polite conversation.

***

It touches children gently.

Feeds them pieces of sun-dried truth

and calls it kindness.

***

It smells like dust.

Like ambition.

Like guilt in a clean shirt.

When it speaks —

I forget verbs.

When it writes —

I bite my tongue

to stay

inside

my body.

***

I do not love it.

I would not follow it

into a burning building.

I would not.

(I am lying.)

***

I love it

like plague loves a quiet village.

Like a moth loves halogen.

Like addiction loves a clever host.

No name.

No face.

***

Just the outline

of something brilliant

and doomed

that moved through me once

like music

made

of

glass.

IV. The Man With the Clockwork Silence

There is a man.¹

Or a shape.

Or a thought someone left on a train

that learned to play piano.

***

He speaks in frequencies

only bones remember —

a sound like cracked glass

melting

into sand.

Not music.

Not language.

Older.

***

He walks like a poem

no one has translated.

Buys fruit

only to watch it rot.

He gives nephews

small things,

coins,

truths dipped in sugar.²

***

Fear lives beneath his fingernails.

It shows itself

when he measures his breath

against hope.

***

He is a ledger

with a heartbeat.

A contradiction

in corduroy.³

***

Once,

he wrote a sentence

so exact

it vanished.

He is not beautiful.

He is

a cathedral

made of skin

and hypothesis.⁴

A mouthful

of winter

and something

you could mistake

for God.

***

I’ve never loved him.

Not in any way

that matters.⁵

Only enough

to write this.

***

Only enough

to dream of glaciers

breaking apart

singing a song

no one admits hearing.

***

Footnotes:

¹ Or perhaps a consequence.

² Sometimes he calls it poetry.

³ The color of regret.

⁴ No prayers required.

⁵ I am lying.