Faults

Faults

The truth is they know us best, our flaws,

and we shun them like the brother

gone to the brothels and pigstys, or the

lover gone off to fortune and come back

with mud on her tongue, or the more:

what he taught her to do: more

than her body of rub and suffer, to be
the palm, the tips of things where all that is 

is the hot/cool pool at the hem of the unscale-

able peak; is and all that’s wanted and beyond
want; as the water and flaws and faults fall off

ecstatic, as they ply every debt

we owe and could be finished with
and chew it and settle it on their tongues, lusting,

going soft in the jaw.  Finally they are slack

and laid out in state.  Look for them in the middle
digit of curled together fingers, in the middle
insides of knees that still creep through, collapsed

flat serene on the hardwood kneeler at mass, esp-

ecially during the transubstantiation.  How their

penance begins in the unlit censer and depends on

one little crumb of resign to melt and smolder

into the dark hollow of the charcoal.  The smoke

could be the boy who kissed without permission

but not without desire, something so brand new,
and never near to pigs or even thinking to.  Still,

let it be known that it’s the pigs

who access us best, and it because of this

we eat them, we know their snorts and chortles, 

and we eat them, don’t we, eat pieces

of ourselves to convert the witness
and toss the linen to the girl or the boy who we fell
against like water, the water we’d come to wash

ourselves in, abrading our flaws

and faults that slough off our skin like pox

scabs we’re done with now and not

by some haunting magic not raise a scar. 
Listen: it’s like that isn’t it

but they stay, they do, the scar of girls

and boys from eye to mouth and very easily

they are mistaken for the kind of smile

a face makes when it sees

something it can’t name but knows, oh

I don’t know what it is, a slip into a close

warmth and the claustrophobia is gone,

and the ecstasy is in the lids of the eyes

and the blush of the lips and the caress

the kiss, and practice makes us say:  I’m good

I’m good with this, it is wanted! and the chains
and all of what we've called flaws fall and are gone

and almost never were.