When John Keats was my age, he had been dead for seven years.

The necrophilia makes it seem dirtier than it really is.

Cold comfort, muttered over the phone by 3 a.m. friends with obviously something better to do.

But it’s not the love, not really. It’s more my distraction, a ringing bell calling my name. When she calls I salivate. Her voice sounds like static, like electricity. Sparks fly when we’re motionless, in stasis. When she’s cold.

Like sleeping or whatever else happens under covers on shiny frostbitten autumn nights.  John Keats, dead and so tragically young.

Like each of them, it's what he did before dead that matters.

Now ice forms on her skin, and I remember her fingers were slim, slender, like knitting needles or pins. With her arms out wide like that she was easy to keep still. But when she said my name, it had too many syllables. So I leave her hanging, she’s left me, and I walk, and all the doors are open.

I'm not here for him--or Shelley either, another one, sucking great agonizing gasps of cold seawater into faltering lungs. All the palely loitering I need hangs in Boston Goth bars.

They’re all the places I used to know. Between drinks, I’d call her Tink, as a joke, and she’d mutter under her breath, but when I laughed even she’d smile and with the moon streaming in like that, careful silver, she might have been dead. Dead as the old poets, covered in old lace, and I remember.

Both men buried in Rome, close as husband and wife--too far away and too, too long ago.

Either way, how I held them up? It was all a matter of display. Like how I see myself in storefront windows, reflected in the damp, the condensation.

Sugar maple leaf plasters my boot wetly, caution orange. I pluck it away.

Dickinson? Closer, but somebody would have gotten her by now. Rosetti, too: if "The Goblin Market" isn't a dead giveaway.... Dylan Thomas a better candidate, but I hadn't been the first at his grave.

Laden, I trudge uphill, past serried headstones.

Everything is wet, but still there are marks left to make. I unfurl rolls of paper, dig charcoal from the bottom of a ratty bag; I used to sign all of my pieces, my etchings.

But my name means less than it used to.

Some aren't born with it.

Cursed with the will, the skill, fire in the belly but no fire on the soul... we beg. Tin cup to hand, rags bound about the brow.

Now I wait for the pennies to fall from heaven, commuter cash, and I spend them quickly. I buy sandwiches on stale bread, coffee without cream because it’s cheaper. And I walk, because here everything is free.

I come to the grave of the hanged man, the rabble-rouser, the forgotten bard. No more songs, he sang, but a power's laid here with him, prickle and chafe.

Maybe here there are methods to my madness, maybe here she’ll come to me.

The sacrifices: chapbooks, a sad few shred-eared literary journals. Self-published, unpaid, unread. Unremembered. Whatever it is, I never had it.

I used to type out everything, but my hands don’t shake, not anymore. Now I have records, memoirs, everything.

Paper doesn't burn all that well: thus the brazier. Hibachi. Whatever. Crickets resounding: sky first flame, then mauve, ash. 

Finally it's cool enough: I dip fingers, ash-trace his deep cut marble name.

I show her, my piece, my strung up, she has wings, or maybe that’s all I can see, butterfly girl on blue velvet. My words were for her.

Poetry dies unvoiced. Soon, soon. Use me up, cinder-crumble.

Maybe she flies away, or maybe she doesn’t.

Green fairy, mauve fairy. She's in there with him, singer no more under crumbled earth, sod, concrete vault and cheap coffin.

Shovel. Pry bar.

Maybe when I sign my name, the charcoal will look like dirt.  Maybe turn itself silver, become the key, the lock, and we’ll be trapped, the two of us.

Thick walls and roof: oven, and she'll consume me, licking her fingers, sucking up the juices. White-hot art.  Shelley.  Keats.  Me.

I can maybe get ten years out of her if I'm careful.

Maybe she’ll be dead then, blanket of earth, memory, art. Alabaster, smooth as ice, cold as marble.

(The necrophilia makes it seem dirtier than it really is.)