My skin is iron, welts
and scars, scabs, of lives past; of the living
of my dreams
I gave up
broke
my eyes
into lighthouse shards
I wait. I wait by the river,
the three-headed hound, and I smell,
I smell, the fear
like a part of myself, like another head
that no one can see
The wailing of Eurydice, the honey
of the bard, all slaked by the river,
all drowned in her purling; my skin
is a mirror of past lives: the river
for me
never quenched, o, the thirst
Lethe I dream your forgetting,
the river flowing my belly full, the river
rising, like tides, to my head, the river
swallowing like ocean my voices
and giving me something new
But the river, Lethe, despises me
the wolf in a guise of three heads, the wolf
in a skin of bare steel, the teeth, sister Lethe,
that will dig you to ground, the gunmetal teeth,
sister Lethe, that want only your loss
and
no
more.