Tyurina Allen


TO PROTAGONIST ; FROM ANTAGONIST

   You became the shatter without the wreck
    that eventual actor accounting for my bruises

(but everyone suffers with dreams of leaving so)

     I wrote your secrets on the palms of my hands
     I covered your mouth with them

I watched you tattoo your body with the same words
& I made you breakfast in that afternoon

you said: to you poetry
is more important than myself or anyone

(I didn't want to tell you the worst was true)
I did not apologize
& I ate what I cooked


        my voice hung like icicles in dry air          "somewhere I'll make you
proud"

I begin to request the distance of streets  / You were already warming
yourself by the fire

                        in a distant town    in that distant stretch where

I once considered rewriting you
    making you that hero flying away until He was invisible but

Protagonist, we were
    an antonym  /
    a contradiction lacking apology

it was all obvious
    all that music
repeated in our soaked mouths

    it is important (here)
that this is blamed only on the skin of our hands ;
those ten fingers now tracing the slopes of another body

in an act like love.



Location: North Dakota
Email: rhcp1970@hotmail.com
Book: Especially the Deer (Sundress Publications, 2002)







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