The Fall
Recent Scientific Evidence
Suggests It Takes One-Fifth
of a Second to Fall in Love
That face caused a spasm in my thorax.
The fanged convulsion lasted forty years.
Not anything will free me, drugs or axe,
Until I enter my last tomb where fears
Are wrestled down behind a dead snake’s blank
Eye. Ribs and marrow, would-be knight’s strict steel,
Protected me like any small-town bank—
Until Clyde Barrow triggered his appeal.
Some chemical went shooting through the pressed
Oblivion that always had sufficed
My torso like an insect’s brittle chest
Before that hormone left it bruised and sliced.
Your loveliness was venom’s brightened tooth
And lasts as long as Jesus Christ’s crushed truth.
