Preparations

by Stephen Ellis

Color and light
when I wake, are
my angel, presiding
over craving
to have my own
teats sucked
by the oracle of
prescient death,
not of milk, but
of the equally
natural pain
endured, as how
we manage
love, for this
perpetual ache
is nourishment
shared from
mammal to daemon,
a nursing that
feeds fire
and infection,
the forms of my
personal and now
internal controversy
argued amongst
animal endearments
in which I have
no opinion, but
reverie and finally
nothing but so
simple as pure
Mercy. I imitate
what my body
used to be, and in
those soundings,
the chill that
comes with fever
burns with a bliss
that makes dark,
the love whose
protest against
the death of sexual
need, begins to
set me free.