Matador Waving

You kept reminding me
of the rug that was counting
moons before you are pulled from beneath me,
through a trapdoor masking the fissures of lostlove
sympathetic smiling eyes
just as inevitably as 2 precedes 4.

From the moment we struck
I have always
tried to be the best man
in the race for dreams flagged and dispossessed,
fleeting against
naturally failing
competing flames that learned to
follow learned to scald me running to the bridges
we have laid between those charcoaled hours
of two and four.

But I was the one
with sweaty sheets.
still damp with snow and anxiousness
inside the wool stockings I had sewn the winter I
became unsure of the
apparition who began faceless
to slip between

the craning ceremonial folds of my heart
so easy as tonight burns today
light awakening me to traces of
what I will come to know
as half-succubus or something else profiling Roman divinity

I have grown unsure of intention and less sure
of my need to look anywhere but
into the eyes of the bull reflecting
a matador waving
my heart
worth it’s weight in silk
relying purely on a hunch to raise the cautious fire
before the oncoming could extinguish
the memory of the red lit
smoke rising from shredded tobacco
or finger hair or joined skin or desire
to tame something wild
that has yet to have been tamed