around the corner

Or perhaps you weren't waiting
under the pane of that
window, and around the corner,
and I was patient.

Your colloquialisms, Sistene ceiling,
monied and parents,
(My brother & Abi laugh at you)
they are little charms
worn inside your shirt to guard you.

Or perhaps you were the stock man of
the formulaic universe, the damp ankles
of you, humming in the rain;
waiting around the corner.

I am not competing for you
so pretty as that, over tea
over dancing.
Or perhaps you weren't
waiting there...
--
But no! I am science, I am the triptych, the orbital burnings of fortuitous chemicals. You have no conception, the way you theorize, the prestige, when I devour galaxies. Under the study window, in alien ions and scaled naturalistic epicenters, to the weird Uranic music, I hurtle against your carven baseboards. And around the corner, the mutated bodies of Abi and my brother shake with supressed laughter as you bend to touch my scientific arms. You lily-white, you social burden of another man's age! The chambers of the heart, the stomachs of a sheep, the chambers of a nautilus-- well, which is to be ours? The burn of the graphic chemicals in your drink, that may even have come from my hands. I may even have been a chemical burn. And so I press my postulates on your geographic society. I cannot undeceive you, but I can paint what you see under my microscope or I can interpose my body between the end of your telescope and the start of the sky. Don't you touch my chemical burn!