This is the husband, a stone Ramses head indifferent and flecked with flies, with lies, austere as the sunset that gilds his despair. He's different, this husband, he's changing 5 songless and bald, moulting his plumage undoing his hues. Long ago he finished with sending me poems, his pen as dry and stark as a husk. Done are the days of ripping the earth 10 to snare me a fist of flared flowers that peeped, in our noontime, so "naive et charmant" from my ratsnest of hair. Eons back in the loaf-warm tome of romance, he shut himself off like a faucet 15 from my teasing yeast, my rise as regular as the calendar. He no longer bleeds in straight silver lines, stopped are the drops once poignant as years. His tongue is no longer a spongeable pumice to leaven or sharpen my sex upon. 20 Turned off are the nights of spasms and gladness, torn away like kites by unbearable thunder. Stoked stiff in his study with his load of self-pity he chugs through his Churchill in his stagnant recliner, a thrumb drubbed on Nietzche, and a pinky in Zeno, 25 dividing and slicing our lives into zeroes.
From the collection "The Soft Assault"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.