Needs a title

How many nights in the adoration of insomnia

did I mean to ask you one thing

or another, if teeth, yours, mine, the ones

you dream of coughing up, flowers of blood

into your fist, were specialized

bones. Because I wrestle

with the angel of science

there are days I want my citizenry

of the earth, my government of flesh,

revoked, disbanded, recalled, impeached,

impugned by the hail of noon light.

I never want the meal

from the gravid machine

which accepts my coins

like excuses, but you, how can I account

for your absence,

what is my excuse

for my own presence? Even in these words,

I’m dusting for prints

hoping to track where I’ve been

and what I’ve touched

and the fiber of the air disturbs all things,

every thing. Let me sweep

you up, bundle the day

with string, let me hide the sky’s refracted

realia of starlight

in the sugar on the sill

above the sink

where my hands

pretend to make a code of being clean.

How many unknowns

there are in the day,

in the algebra of wakefulness,

in the skitter of birds through the storm-thinned trees,

how much I’ll never care

to know, how heavy

your arms in mine as we lift

the separate darkness of sleep.