in my bed

[plsgoawaywhoisthis]

the night was a confession in reverse —
two liars praying to the same old body.
her silhouette, a psalm of decay,
my mouth, a failed resurrection.

we didn’t speak.
syntax would’ve ruined it.
we just orchestrated collapse,
flesh against flesh,
like architecture grieving its own ruin.

her eyes —
twin black sermons of indifference,
mine —
a cathedral collapsing inward,
begging for relics that no longer believe.

the air hung heavy with aftermaths,
that thick, posthumous sweetness
of something once divine
now rotting in the open.

i touched her shoulder,
as if touching could absolve me,
as if redemption lived in epidermis.
but she was already ghost —
a pulse made of exit wounds.

when she came, it sounded like closure.
when i did, it felt like confession.
and then the silence —
dense, ecclesiastic,
like the world held its breath
and refused to name what we’d done.

you ever lie there,
naked beneath your own mythology,
and wonder
why grief wears such familiar skin?

[Mostly Holy]

I rather loved this poem, it is just the right kind of dark.

Your enjambment mostly works, the poem has great rhythm and flow for the most part. I think you could be bolder with it,and break or condense some more lines. Line like “we didn’t speak.” could even be their own stanzas to really let the words sit.

The religious language skirts the edge of cliche but I think it works because you commit to it. "dense, ecclesiastic" is too abstract to mean anything, perhaps something like "still exegesis" would work better there.

Most of your lines land, a few pull me out of it. "naked beneath your own mythology" is too vague for such an intimate moment, and the images it conjures are absurd (a naked woman hiding behind a painting of the Olympic Gods, perhaps).

"architecture grieving its own ruin” is gorgeous, but the next stanza's “cathedral collapsing inward" merely re-iterates the same image when it could expand or contrast it. The poem as a whole has a static quality, the narrator starts broken and he ends broken. Very nihilistic, and presumably intentional, but even so developing the imagery over the course of the poem might give it more texture

I have read a lot of poems in whihc love is salvation, and plenty of others where it is damnation, but not many in which it is simply a squalid failed sacrament that changes nothing. It is wonderfully bleak and I think it would be even better if you cut the weak abstractions and focused more on that aspect

[plsgoawaywhoisthis]

I rather loved this poem, it is just the right kind of dark.

Your enjambment mostly works, the poem has great rhythm and flow for the most part. I think you could be bolder with it,and break or condense some more lines. Line like “we didn’t speak.” could even be their own stanzas to really let the words sit.

The religious language skirts the edge of cliche but I think it works because you commit to it. "dense, ecclesiastic" is too abstract to mean anything, perhaps something like "still exegesis" would work better there.

Most of your lines land, a few pull me out of it. "naked beneath your own mythology" is too vague for such an intimate moment, and the images it conjures are absurd (a naked woman hiding behind a painting of the Olympic Gods, perhaps).

"architecture grieving its own ruin” is gorgeous, but the next stanza's “cathedral collapsing inward" merely re-iterates the same image when it could expand or contrast it. The poem as a whole has a static quality, the narrator starts broken and he ends broken. Very nihilistic, and presumably intentional, but even so developing the imagery over the course of the poem might give it more texture

I have read a lot of poems in whihc love is salvation, and plenty of others where it is damnation, but not many in which it is simply a squalid failed sacrament that changes nothing. It is wonderfully bleak and I think it would be even better if you cut the weak abstractions and focused more on that aspect

hey  it's super helpful to hear your feedback, i'll take this into consideration; no further comments from me. thank u!!