Radioactive Loveliness
The face across from me is beautiful,
So beautiful it strikes my lungs with pain,
Destroys desires for being dutiful—
Except for loyalty to loving’s stain.
I thought that beauty of this order could
Not be discovered in this modern day,
A time producing ordinary good,
OK, and fine, not excellence to spray
The heart with heavy metal bullets to
Irradiate it and to make it know
A crippled injury. This face is true
To nothing but its fallout and its glow.
My ribs are evanesced to open sores
In flesh. A nuclear lust licks my pores.