A Climbing Rose in a Ruin

Somewhere between soft touching
and hard kissing, I swerved into love;
somewhere between a dead end
and a wreck at a hairpin turn.

I wrote exotic poems for her,
sang them through a hedge of nettle and wire.
And when she drained my heart pallid
I crumbled comatose for years, for years.

O rose of my chest, bramble of the bones,
where love sleeps amid a ruin of brick and leaf—
Bloom in my teeth, pollinate the tongue.
Press your thorns gently to the backs of my eyes!