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.