Adultery

Wear dark glasses in the rain. Regard what was unhurt as though through a bruise. Guilt. A sick, green tint. New gloves, money tucked in the palms, the handshake crackles. Hands can do many things. Phone. Open the wine. Wash themselves. Now you are naked under your clothes all day, slim with deceit. Only the once brings you alone to your knees, miming, more, more, older and sadder, creative. Suck a lie with a hole in it on the way home from a lethal, thrilling night up against a wall, faster. Language unpeels a lost cry. You're a bastard. Do it do it do it. Sweet darkness in the afternoon; a voice in your ear telling you how you are wanted, which way, now. A telltale clock wiping the hours from its face, your face on a white sheet, gasping, radiant, yes. Pay for it in cash, fiction, cab-fares back to the life which crumbles like a wedding-cake. Paranoia for lunch; too much to drink, as a hand on your thigh tilts the restaurant. You know all about love, don't you. Turn on your beautiful eyes for a stranger who's dynamite in bed, again and again; a slow replay in the kitchen where the slicing of innocent onions scalds you to tears. Then, selfish autobiographical sleep in a marital bed, the tarnished spoon of your body stirring betrayal, your heart over-ripe at the core. You're an expert, darling; your flowers dumb and explicit on nobody's birthday. So write the script — illness and debt, a ring thrown away in a garden no moon can heal, your own words commuting to bile in your mouth, terror — and all for the same thing twice. And all for the same thing twice. You did it. What. Didn't you. F***. F***. No. That was the wrong verb. This is only an abstract noun.