sanguine love

 
“For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” - Walt Whitman  
 
 
 
 
on day three, you ask me if I have a favourite word  
 
‘rot’, you declare is yours, as you wait for me to blink;  
‘blink’, I say is mine; you smile—as the tea leaves scamper  
 
in the boiling water—probably amused at this declaration of  
brazen innocence, another Whitmanesque anecdote that you  
will lock in that cellar: that smells of mold, disinfectants,  
 
and old soot; where I dither amid extreme projections:  
a limbless phantom joker or a bard tied to a cannon;  
but m’love, did you know about the letters exchanged  
between Bram Stoker and Walt, long before the former  
 
chose to write about ‘blood’ and change history.  
on day one, I ask you if you know about types of  
relationships; your smile was a crescent moon,  
 
in another life, one could have used it to drain  
warm, throbbing life out of the incision, that  
 
was caused—in a blink, to a body left to rot
 
because ephemera must prevail
 
for love to  
win.