exasperation of incomprehension

so i indulged in the luxury of lying
and slipped a few through the shoulder straps
of your ultraviolet party dress.

and you see a fit to pitch and a hue to raise to your pretty cheeks.

darling. hold your silence like a purse on your lips.
i’ve painted glasgow smiles upon the faces of
mute cinema thespians.

you say you know.
i’ve burned clove cigarettes at undertailored funerals.
i’ve poisoned fishtanks and you’ve seen the dead carcasses
float atop the waters, glinting like godsends for the gold rush forty-niners.

but do you know?
i’ve built prisons from rocks they brought back
from the moon that did not glow at night and turn
the barracks into lighthouses.
these prisons housed the innocents.
i have worn the children down to dust
and the women down to their bones.
i have run an incontinent sieve across
a land and come up with the purest
of the pure to have ever birthed.
i’ve burned carnations in celebration.

i’ve run gold and silver molars as currency.
i have built an economy out of broken eye frames,
tarnished wedding rings, little girls’ hairclips
and everything else of value that you can find
inside of a room crowded with the dead.
and inside of the dead crowded with hearts, livers,
lungs and stomachs.

i’ve seen fields claimed as depositories lay
dry and barren over eternal decomposition.
i have sent centuries of denial and goodwill
up in chimney smoke and fanned the flames
to warm the cockles of my pride.

i had discovered a new nicotine,
one that works for many and quicker
than your cigaronnes stained red by
your rhododendron lips that i’ve
often pressed a handful of lies to.

you raise your voice. you rise on your heels, your personal dais.

you say,
i’m so early i make you seem last century by proxy.
i set my clocks to ring before you wake from your fitful dreams.
my french is stunted, baby steps and toppling over with every other one.

darling.
i have dominated the death chain.
i have concocted a night and fog like quicksand.
i have split the shadows like the curtains of
a proscenium arch and entered stage left
to kill the last vestiges of propriety and humanity.

you don’t care.
i take my meticulous bites of lobster with the knife in the wrong hand.
i raise heads when i raise my hand coupled with my coprolalia.
you say you’re at the end of the admittedly long rope that i’ve given you.

darling.
if i have by any chance forgotten myself altogether and given you a long rope,
it would have only been to hang yourself with.
-Ito