Joshua Morley

A Boy & A Void

Now, now, I give myself, molten iron to the cast

Cast being air incongruous—mist, flora, cuticle, the ether . . ..

Bone, incandescent first. Then, solute in blood.

In this barbarous light, I manage boyhood,

absoluteness. I abide in that phantom cavity provided me.

My lungs, yielding, understand that ribs are an agreed elastic limit.

Under this arduously motherly light, you, the moon, provide my form

definition. Definition I never asked for. I never asked, I never asked

for nurture. Your nurture is torture. Your nurture borders me.

& it is your abasement, your lust for intrinsic luminance,

your low-esteem, your elevated privilege, that

gives you pass to boast your refulgence.

Trust, I do not care, do not need braggart. Really, I do not need it.

So please, take back your light. Reflectivity is millstone enough and I

do not care for astrology, do not care for realisms.

Yet the night remembers me, remembers my margins,

caresses me with cold & gnarly fingers, twists and flexes

its scarce light, amplified in this dark hue about me.

And my head seats the course for the chase, some impalpable field

behind my eyes. When I close them, I find they are your portal in.

It is a viscous darkness behind my ocular curtains.

And in this light—in the lack of it—I wear a boundless nakedness,

a fictile plasticity, but there is no cast, for I do not see it.

In this moment of infiniteness, I catch respite,

however fickle, for with entry you always leave souvenirs,

visual remnants that now coalesce into my own personal

haunting. A facsimile of your light, a reminder to conform . . . .

So, in the light of being masculine, in light of bragging

being a thing you would do—the irony of you nagging me with motherly light—

I should tell you that, even in this light, I am complete. In this light I—