PLEA

stay here with my body hard while
the ghost of all my thrills
goes hunting deep
in all the paint-cracked walls
let the milk of a spider's heart
run an I.V. through my navel
where the cord was pinched off

let the benches run thick
with vines and white green grapes
in the hot cathedral of my only spires

say to ribs I leave so far behind
that you are my book of stairs
at the end of all this ascending silence
there will be a descending scream
of our perished word and all its dying worlds
let me be veined and free