"They want you alone..."
More Perihelion:
Bob Sward's Writer's Friendship Series
Haunting Beneath the Skin
Your skinny ghosts will come.
In New York they wait for streetlights,
for day’s swelling to be iced. When night
creeps in, it steps cold and breathes deep,
sucking light from narrow streets.
That’s when they fit, when everything
is thin and dark. They want you alone,
shoulder to shoulder. Pinned tight on brick.
They tumble down in rain at sunset,
all the ones you paled and hollowed.
Guilt siphons you
through those white reeds,
friends who cast their colors to the fog
of your secrets, lovers who ate your lies
like food. They bared themselves,
and you spun the grindstone and carved.
Cloudbursts can be scalpels, cleansing
spotted sidewalks and souls. In forgotten
corners of the city they are busy cutting,
excising stain—not them. They come at you
as piercingly, but nourish on your blood,
clamp inside like something fearful growing.
They fatten, with a cancer’s knotty suck.
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