When I hold you, like a looking glass I bring your ghost to life.
I condense your spirit into something tangible; it sparkles in the sun in my eye.

When I hold you close I make you real, and take
All your thoughts and hollow perceptions of your body,
which to you, as mine is to me, is an X-ray viewed from inside out—
I make you opaque, a boulder, golden and weighty inhabiting your flesh, as if
the neurons normally reserved for all this thought and angst and astral projection rush
to that spot on your arm, like pain signals,
or to your shoulder, as it circumambulates your spine,
or to your breasts, weighed down with sudden purpose;
to your feet, as they flex like fans in the wind;
along your arching back as you stretch catlike upon waking,
gossamer fibers gently breaking, muscle bellies yawning
in the morning sun and livening air.

You make me real too, my love. You give this hollow body
filled with bullshit
reason to exist, to move and activate;
a ballast point in all these storms of delusion,
a respite from all this garbage.

I am the ape trapped in the money machine,
game show audience of inner mind all keen to see me whirl and grab at all this floating cash,
and they and I both see the joke, the irony,
the fact that soon the air will stop spinning,
and that the cash means nothing anyway.

And yet we all do the fucking dance, and clutch it to our breasts like pigs,
whirling ever harder for the ratings, spinning away the revelation
that soon the producer will press the red button,
and the air will die, and the cash will fall,
and the lights will go off,
and we will walk out of the dark empty room.

When I have you I seem to forget about all this shit,
at least I think;
Because you have brought me out of the dark,
you really have,
And you bring me back into the world,
the warm world;
Because I bask in you like a lizard in the sun.

I’m hoping, heart entire, that you can do it again,
that your light still shines condensed like gold for me,
that your image still focuses crystal clear,
realer in the real;
that with your diamond you can catch my light
and make me whole again,
unite my fragmentary mind.

And if your love rings false and surface-deep, then I’ll go back,
for now, into my cash machine and clutch at straws, money signs in my eyes
like an idiot, a fucking idiot, and
won’t I know it, too,
til I can bring myself again to look upon that wound you couldn’t heal,
to find the bullet in the bullet hole,
the depth, the substance that I couldn’t see,
or else accept my
ever futile, ever hollow body.