Promethean Viscera

Promethean Viscera

“And I have known the arms already, known them all-/ Arms that are braceleted and white and bare ” T.S. Eliot “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html

To lie naked and pale
with the small breasts
thrust upward, and
hands tied behind my
back, and to dissect the
core of me with keen
talons, apt beaks until
I am raw and free in the wind:

to know what love is meant
in harm.

What contact, close or no, now?
With these two hands limp as fish
and netted down, with the lung as
a gill, too close to what is cherished
for any good to be done.

Such a
strange
lover I
have been,
to have
done
enough to
accept
this, and
to then
accept
your love
as some-
thing I
cannot
return to
you but
which I
will take
of.

I was too alive
to live off love,
I needed these
things that you
did not understand
but which you would
not give to me:

I needed blood-cells, I needed skin
I needed to take so much in; I left by you with
crumbs strewn on my lip, wine dribbling down my chin.

You only gave the space
between my hand and your hand.
You only gave the fragmentation
as I sat tied to the rock:
you gave as much as you took,
and I believe I learned so well from you.