Dominic.

it crests,
inhaling us,
our surfboards,
our balance,
the water
imprinted with our
souls, if it all froze
you'd be cast

the die is cast, Caesar said
you said he said, if it all froze

I'm counting on you
Rome's counting on you
past ten

that's when the stairs diffuse
each step so painful,
we know what waits at the bottom

of the sea the landing
busts submarine skin
steel plated, snake eyes weighted,
you blew a gasket

Marie Antoinette asked me yesterday
how we managed to hang ten
for so long on the wave

of words, of men, of sex, betrayal, sheer luck;
the wave of eyeballs, emerald hummingbird's wings, jasper kisses of monarch butterflies;
the wave of eternal mortality, of archaic nunneries, of traditional forms of self-mutilation and capitalized italicized Love...

I remember how, as if it were
frozen in polaroid

I didn't tell her how we radiated every hue out of our prisms
how we refracted and captured the sun's power and lit every street
for miles of suburbs, disco-balling some sort of minuscule perfect

but your waxen wings melted
and boiled the ocean
while your flaxen hair
tendrils roiled in billows

we've reached the case of the pillow,
together, feeling dirty and ashamed
on the worldly tongue
of the universal clam

we beg that it
make us into icy pearls
so that in a thousand years the natives pick us up
and find us useful for the rituals of the time
that have replaced the ones sacrificed
by failure in repetition

mother will be proud of us for trying
by then, maybe

and we will have at least tried, Dominic,
at something better than what we were alone

I gave up control for once and you loved me
and I loved that
and we loved it, every second of it

at the last beloved second let us revel in our graves,
we are buried with gemstones
in the same soil
that all soils
originate
from,
twinkling on the edge of the deep

we beg for it to die, and the sea to be placid
and the moon to go dark, and for all things to die
it's too real

it's too beautiful, Dominic, you know as well as I do.