rotting me

by David McLean

"so there is death" our kittens told me,
they knew it in the kitchen and under
the bathtub, where Anxiety slept.
they spelled my mortality and daily decay
effortlessly spilling days to Cadaver's waste
where paper traced moral fate
in inaudible words the last gods heard.

for we were born too late for oblivion
our thousand dead generations
displaced in the sewer of time,
the sweet abyss where the missing reassembles
the lost boys in sadness,
mad as cats and hungry as dogs
sleeping empty-bellied in the midday heat,
where truth was written by window's sun
loving nothing,
like that clear-eyed Jew fag poet who asked us
"who wants to get fucked up the ass, really?"
like words fuck their meaning
in their prolix sodomy

he knows now the nothing
and void's vaguest answers there,
in case he still care,
though i know too much
and nothing,
the exigencies of fumbling touch,
everything and never enough

for his key was at the window,
his key was in the sunlight at the window,
my key is in the darkness of the night
my key is in the darkness of the night
the bright black light of night
tonight

David McLean was born in Wales and has lived in Sweden since 1987. He has about 220 poems in around 110 issues of 95 magazines and e-zines. Poems are online, printed, or forthcoming at such sites and in such magazines as Parameter, Zygote in My Coffee, Erbacce, Sein und Werden, Venereal Kittens, Clockwise Cat, Mad Swirl, Lit Circus, Gold Dust, The Smoking Poet,  Haggard and Halloo, Gargoyle, BlazeVOX, Winamop and foam:e. He has many cats and a very young fiancée.