Similar Structure is Restricting

What's the topic for research, where is the taste of the crumb, the ritual's sacrifice,
calisthenic hyperbole, benumbed-- is it in the cloud detail, or the liminal edifice,
in the thick of her milky thighs, behind a high-priced veneer of denim and labels?

Belief in the responsiveness of mentorship, in saddles packed with flesh, dopamine
travel, iron horse beveling a Saturnalian occasion, soft silver limb-sleep of teenager
embrace, after the longing of a warmth-- she left you there without music to channel

and kept the curtain drawn to hide your wails and silent, sunken eyes from the sun
and its attendant champions of life, meant to stay on supports as long as it takes
to change your mind about dissolving with the rest, to die deliberately with a gun.

To hide your wails and lament, on the veritable surface of harm, absent purpose;
passing the shoulder at sixty-five, headed to city-center, a Jabulani soccer ball, concave
on the valve side, I could see such minutiae, a pinhole deflated, black slush, squidding.

Cut through to bone like a serrated accident of malice, I had to stop her from screaming
You had to use the rest of your booze as a solvent, to lift the stains and freshen the air
while I resumed smoking and selfishly perusing the battered lungs of revised humming.

They say you broke your own heart, but I believe you're innocent, because I've seen
the damage self-defense can do, and it may have stemmed, they say, from the scaffold
on the campus by the tennis courts, where below was placed a vaulting cushion for falls

even though the limberest jumped from the top to enjoy the second or two of free-fall,
I could never ascend past the middle if I was to leap down, did not trust the vinyl, nor
the break of wind and holler, nor the nearest hospital, where I'd died twice before twelve.

But I know it came from a seedling during times of civil unrest and holocaust, smoking
black and red-grey, raining a musty coat on empty bones of marrow, guitar stringing,
descendants dreaming about forgetting in an elderly woman's tearful lecture in Poland.

A shovel wrapped in flannel, redcoat armies versus guerillas, musket-shot deafness
murdering the Berkshires with rented Ford Rangers and obscure elements from periodic
tables, absurd atomic numbers, proton theory, medicine or physics, different tangoes.