Feeling Very Faint

A wrung teabag is how I feel with an afgan on my lap.

Women in lace contemplate the strengths and flaws of demure and attack.

Last night in so much chiffon I could have caught a thousand minnows,

Little silver darting elusive desires.

Bent over a purpling rose today I wondered where my chaise lounge was.

Evidently someone forgot to bury it with me in my tomb.

Forgot also to bury with me the rose oil when I died;

A fatal combination of the Sweat and the Rheum.

The Sweat and The Rheum and both brought upon by you.

Five hundred years ago I broke your window with my shoe,

Yelling ‘You would, Wouldn’t you, how very like you! You would.”

As I threw it high and forcefully to prove to you I could.

And my heels were of that curved and pointed sort.

The shoe flew through your damned room and pierced and tore that dread painting apart;

The one I never liked, oil landscape of someone leaving

Tuscany with their back turned.

Deeper now my eyes seem to myself than they have ever been.

Longer and older my fingers, yet less explicable my tongue.

Craving just a night of sleep, I only now begin to think of warmth

Wrapped around my bones but cannot lose myself to it.

And the things my hands have seen know but never speak,

Except the cut and balmy knuckle from my ill advised knife-play

I sat and swung my feet and sucked the blood away, and sucked

More blood away, and could have sucked the blood all day, because

My condition was an ill-kept secret.

I was feeling very faint. It caused me to sigh for the chaise lounge,

To bend over the rose.

It caused my eyes to sink further; submerged river stones.

And while strong whisky is for women and can also be for men,

And long blades are for women and can be for men too,

The chiffon with its secret strength of irridescent net,

The rose over which I bent, my knuckle bloody rent,

Belong only to me, just me, feeling very faint.