blonde in san diego

In the last resurrection of a revenant dusk, 
atop the cities, brick reliquaries
Rose like concrete heirlooms 
and she lie
ascending sainthood 
through my hagiography 
Amongst the golden hour posing for sky
Finest threads of copper filament 
Conducted around her eyes 
and I trembled at such electricity, 
searching for ground, 
stealing glances of set emeralds. 
I felt the prod of a phantom pain 
where man contends within coils,
The reconciliation of a primordial descending. 
Shame bloomed across my aching, 
blushed by the brume of an itinerant memory 
blown away like so much of the gossamer of man.
I traced every line of ink 
and wished I could bare my teeth 
to their margins.
I dined with my fantasies, 
awash in the naivete of their coda.
That I should worship 
the envy of her visage.
And put an end to my heist 
more impoverished than before. 

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About the Author
Derek W Schwenk

Derek Schwenk is a poet and founder of the Cowabunga Zen Poets Society. He lives in a town of dying steel mills and air quality advisories. A town that prostituted itself to a $28 billion dollar a year nonprofit and big tech companies. That over promise and under deliver, gentrifying neighborhoods in the process. A city known as Pittsburgh.

His work has been featured in (anti)R-A-M-O-N-E-S Zine, Dead? Dead! Dead. Poets Society (A Periodical), Labyrinths and Other Scary Mazes (A Book of Puzzles)