i want to save you; i want to change you

i want to be the dismembered saturday evening darling,
all ready for another peaceful day,
with none of the friday regrets to cloud my rather finite brain.
so live forever on the edge of eleven pm,
getting ready to ready to say goodbye to worrisome week.

yes, i desire all the empty-minded rituals that fill nighttimes.
i can wash my teeth a thousand times, one thousand times,
until my gums are reddened like my nail beds.
which one of us touches their eyes every time a stranger coughs?
it is my compulsion from here on out to bake macaroons
and listen to irish-voiced singing boys until wax paper fingers get me;
get me down.

i want to be his narcolepsy sister who gets to sleep in his presence.
would he be the child and draw on my face
or the knight and carry me up the marble staircase penthouse suite?
i tend to think all the compassion would shatter all my frigidly composed nerve endings,
and all the surgical futures cannot change ice shards
melting faster than the arctic glaciers –
the site of my conception as an unfeeling creature.
still, i want to slip down with closed eyes today
and the next if it means meeting the fears i call conquered.

all the friendships i never made stay beneath an ocean floor,
only meaning that this planet’s very revolutions are broiling them
in the fine sauce of the lies i never had to tell to keep my face spotless;
and the parlor lady queen aspirers compliment my cigarette skin.
i am the circle burn on the crook of train conductor mother’s guidance wrist –
if he clings to her manipulation limbs, in all their preservation, i know my targeted desires.
the little beam of all my obsessions can send itself straight between her hereditary eyes;
they hold all the everything’s she transgressed
and regressed back into child’s mind
(could my desperate attempt at salvation for both of us be motivated by all the same?)