Heaven Within the World

Liquid

Beneath the muscle, the bone

I reunite with the smoking, seeking virgin

The long crying, sweat of me

Before the grind got going.

You remind me I am alive,

That the Under 21 night of dancing,

Lost Boys, long black coats,

Twenty Marlboros and

earnest lack of self-preservation

is tucked inside good.

Feels like heaven,

Heaven is closer.

You awaken me from the drip of the sink.

This train is faster than you know.

Pass from a ten-year-long verse,

bridge chorus, pause

into a gentle, wailing guitar ballad.

Somehow there is this youth of mine

Still.

You remind me

I am liquid.

Beneath the bone,

throughout the skin.

Denise Roma

Little eternities

The weightedness of this aching

is molten fierce.

(You said I must live with it.)

I spend little eternities of long minutes

in this place of cold wind, rain

and torturing heat

to which it seems you have never been.

How could you be so cruel:

She whose veined insides I erupted from,

her mind a smeared map

of red, black and blue lines, all dead ends.

He who took his toys and left

despite his knowing the stillness

within the eye of the hurricane

where I lie in newspapers and baby blankets,

his thumb in his mouth, too.

Despite that he kept me once,

for two years,

he is done with loving me.

All this snow

falling onto our trees, our city.

Every person hurrying through this storm,

beside me wherever I go:

Are you seeing these stars,

finding your pain

barely bearable.