New Endymion

She visits still too much, dressed in aromas
of fir needles, mango, mold: I still get lost
knowing she’s close, me not getting younger
or more conscious. Sometimes I fantasticate
I’m broad awake: her witchy presence waits
for me to jump into her arms, but then she’s just
an incoherent ache in sleep’s freaked scenes.
I feel her frosty nitrogenous hands and wrists
vaporing nooses around my head and feet
and genitals, conjuring my drab hair
into a party bowl of oiled, desirable locks.
She makes me nervous, but what would I do
without her? So long as I can’t have her,
I want her and this alarming manic frequency.
Then again, who wants to wake to change,
its pulped, smelly suit of meat, drawing flies?
My night-watch hot girl, moon-maiden, mom,
let me get just one night’s sleep without regret,
released from your foxy ticklish fondlings,
your latest smell of windblown fresh-cut grass.

--W. S. Di Piero