lemon cake

Oil on the lips,
oil on the hands, sweet gleaming light
from the middle of a sheet of wax paper.

Somewhere a syringe is dripping with honey,

and the tense sweet tart of canned cherries
bursts from our bodies like light spilling
out of the cracks in a suit of armor.

We are beasts who would eat
the mangled heart of Adam,
if only sometimes.

All bites are answered
by future bites
until that last sticky ghost,

photo-negative bloodstain in syrup,
spread like a chalk-dust sidewalk sillouette,

gets crumpled up
with the soiled napkins
and buried in the wax-paper robes
it was swaddled in.