Dreaming of Leviathan

Even when my eyes are closed, I am haunted by yours. 

I ache for sleep and yet you’re still awake, forever in my mind

Looking at me, staring and studying and searching for

Something. Something lost, something forgotten. I wish I had more

Than just your face in my mind, more than a memory. I wish

I could forget. But you’re still here, my dreams your reality 

Distant but too close for night to be of any comfort.

I’ve tried reaching for you, you know, hands out, palms up

Maybe in prayer, maybe not, but if not to hold you then at least

To garner some semblance of your warmth, your skin and scent

Which still stains my bedsheets. What I would give

To bleach them clean of you the same way you bleached your hair

All white in my bathroom, smiling at me in the mirror. You never 

Turned around, too scared of the chemicals dropping into your eyes. 

I wish you had turned around, just once, to look at me. See me. 

I wish I was a speck of dust back then, worming under your eyelid

Make you rub the bleach in. See how you like it, having another person

Burned into your eye sockets.

I think about it often, see myself as dust coasting 

Along the edge of your iris, a trespasser. I’d dangle my feet over the edge

Two ripe fruits in the sneakers I’ve worn since before I met you. 

I’m not sure if I could lean out over that void - the vertigo always got me

When sitting on the roof of your mother’s porch, smoking her cigarettes

And sharing that last inhale between chapped teenage lips. I light one now,

Flick the ash over the side, watch it spiral down into your pupil,

Down and down and down until the black brine eats it 

Like the bottom of a well. I can feel it reeling me in, a fish on a hook

I am dragged down between the fibres of your eye like Alice

Falling between the threads. A lead weight, cold, until you swallow me

Whole, your blues surging over my head and I am left wandering

Watery, wavering walkways that shift with each blink. Arches of colour branch

In their infinities, a library of every conversation we ever had echo in seafoam

And every look you gave flicks away in silver sardines. I wonder how

Much of me you kept here, and how much of me has been forgotten since.

Larger things, shapes dark and broad drift by, out of focus but there

A shadow stalking. Watching. The feeling turns my sinuses to worms

That writhe and drip fat and wet from my mouth and nose like cheap salmon

But they slip through my fingers as water and disappear, a fish 

To the depths. I follow, melting into an eel black and lean and I slither

Between those woven threads Tyrian and crushed shells. The light goes

And it is dark again, sweet and subtle in the womb space behind your 

Lens. It’s cold down here, the shower of dead plankton and wasted kisses 

Lure me down to where you lie, a carcass white. O whale-fall, a perfect circle

Coiled, your feet in your mouth, your ribs cathedral to the swarm of slither

That worships the last flakes of meat. Pale and naked of skin, of muscle

Of glottal and gloam fat, purple, and wet, I see you in perfect sin. My brothers

Swirl around you, within you, through you. I join them in the rip, in the tear

In the gnaw and chew and snatch and bite but the taste of your rot is sour.

We all push, starving and fighting, the taste of pomegranates turned soft 

Choking our throat. The joy of it is past us, we are hunger, an appetite,

No longer individual in the endless maw that prays for you. We turn inward

On ourselves, blind eyes bulging a boiling mass of blubber and black. 

Our meat is bitter, but kin devours kin until I am left alone once more, 

Huge and bloated but belly still hollow, your church-ribs gone. 

I look up at the spot that was your pupil, distant light, a halo

A sun from distant skies, different times. Starless heaven betrays me.

I wonder if you were really the devil. I wonder if I was ever God.

Maybe I was the one who ate his own tail.