They say that in a lover’s bed,
lies a tiny, little death.
You think
It is not an endless pit to dread,
Your lover’s bed
Is a soft and warm
breeding ground.
Sleep’s hard to come by in a
lover’s bed:
but not this little everyday death:
You’ll just keep their bedbugs fed.
Such are the quiet labors of love,
Sometimes we bleed to save them blood,
sink our backs into broken coils,
wonder if we’ll leave a mark behind.
They’re sharing their blankets,
Squeezing me in;
Surely their bed isn’t just a
plush, lidless, coffin.
Don’t invite fear to your lover’s bed,
She’ll whisper in their weary ear: and
Lovers never hesitate to forget.
Like the tip-of-tongue joy of meals,
Our fingers tell us how we really feel,
Until our wretched lovers’ broken beds,
Prevent it from getting to our heads.
They are morbid lands, the downy, almost pyres
where our lovers nightly retire.
Dangerous places where we willfully
lie whilst sharing our bread;
So what of our own, carefully made bed?
Our familiar sheets will not tickle,
But we know that even self-lovers are fickle—
So we make a safer bet, that
four hands will more readily suggest
companionship than two
And so we dream,
As lovers in beds often do
Happily loved until they fall asleep:
A stupor of forgetting
That love is a gift of giving.
And just like that, in one fell sweep
We’re lying at our lover’s bed’s wobbly feet,
Prepared to mend the breached orifice
Face the curse which persists: reality must suffice In our tiny, little afterlife.
