“Architecture” by Paul McQuade

Durable, unbreakable, a permanent profundity –
this glass between us is no glass;
sand unfragmented,
reforged molten until clarity.
Our hands cannot warm each other
through this polymer membrane.
A marvel. The future.

You spend the day sketching cities with no people.
If I had a womb I would populate them with
homunculi, with replicas and simulacra.
Your face with my eyes; your lips, my skin.
A perfect union. A new amalgam of
biological uncertainty
stronger than steel or bodies of glass and unglass.

You say, I want to open the world with light.
If you wanted to be God I would have built you a shrine
of insect-husks and leaves; a mud-church of skull-cups;
a primitive altar of spines cracked to form.
We are flesh. Let us be flesh.
Let us break and bend and live.
One day,

we will see God from our bathroom windows.

These altitudes are violence, are vertigo, are sickness.
I want the surety of caverns:
heart-chambers, heart-songs.

build me a door
of clean bone

erase the walls between us