the unhappened house

we reek of something half-wrought,
cables of flesh like the vines in the earth
that reach out for our wrists
and tie us to bedposts in places we’ve never slept.
if I close my eyes I can smell the house,
joy and grass, love like a hangman’s noose
that never hung anyone but us,
blood and bitter clippings in the yard.
we’d rake them up as though over skin,
gently gag, collapse the throat
with kisses, hair pulled back, wrists in straps,
cutting down to the bareness of uncovered bone.

we’d ride bareback in starlight coughed up
from black lungs, music in paperback
that lights up every trembling quarter of the sky.
this is the house I should have bought you
that would have been your own, a place
for rest, a place for the dark thing
we called love that didn’t last but couldn’t kill,
a place to live so you could stop renting catastrophes.
this is the house I should have built between
the blood
grass apple blossoms for my snow wight, hair so
black, all the crass things I wrote tattooed
like stitches down your spine.