Ineffable

and yet still it lingers     smoke in my hair
dissonant music drifting indifferent
across the industrial air     It was where
the factories spewed out their coal
and soot     where families lived in
barracks built to withstand world wars
but not heat seepage     I travelled miles
down a highway thinking of bridges
and of chrome meeting salt water
I travelled back into myself     the road
a stretchmark     garish and horrid
leading me away from one engulfed city
straight into the mouth of another
He was not my lover     He was no one
the body said but only because
that is its job     like a factory it works
and spins its wheels and hurls its
debris into the air or under the bed where
it is no longer a matter of murder
but one of archaeology     A death in me
carried along under a guise of pink
the pallor tainted but no longer my own
as I take in the smokestacks and
bridges while my body speaks only
in drones     a pyre made for mourning
for what I left behind was vestal and virgin
and what lay ahead of me was soot-shod
and vitriolic     It seemed symbolic but still
I could say nothing for I had aligned
the chimneys with that music I heard
knowing heaven had sent me a satyr
knowing I lacked the fraternal vengeance
of Dinah     The body buckled     it churned  
it was a machine I allowed to function
all on its own     It knew the moves I was
(driving) trying so hard to forget
caught between rock beds and hard
men     a language I rent in half
not chrome meeting water     not even
murder for my own no's     for that utter
disallowance     for that plot of bones
I pit this skin stretch of highway between