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For a time in 1819, I dated John Keats. |
| It was a May-December romance,
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but I used to like how he wrote me odes |
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in moondust, |
| and I remember the time he hung the North Star
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above the bed where we slept
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| as the spring rain wailed on Winchester. |
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In the morning, we’d drink Hemlock
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| as I combed my spindly fingers through his curls
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--it was the same bed where we cried
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mercy from consumption,
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| but we got sucked
into the black hole |
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Where his fingers slackened and he left me;
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| I got spit up the other side into 1988, |
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to a place where the nightingales came |
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to greet me, bringing me mortality
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| in paper and songs that blinded me temporarily,
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| rendering the whole world senseless— |
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forgetting the ink in John’s bones. |
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