18.11.017 Commitment

He says most of your pictures were taken on a plane;
each flight enough radiation to amount to a cranial x-ray.
I wrote to you once, as God scanned my head:
I think of you while I’m in the sky.
Only He has seen inside.

My fingers quake with dopamine.
I have only one means to reach across the gap;
drained now of strength, they once pushed and pulled
til it widened—it will stay that way.
Jittery taps on light-screens,
glass crack’d, must suffice.

I beg for pictures of your cat,
morose and desperate sop that I am.
We are such adults with our pleasantries.
We have learned resignation so well;
you look forward to the lock of your cage—
the hinges having no need for oil.

You once reached through the bars
(no need then, gate still wide-open);
stuck your dick through in earnest,
spoke such wistful lusty words.
Mine imagining of your barred breath
as you whispered not to let the Keeper hear:
soft, delicate, almost a kiss.

You already had such sad, soulful eyes when first we met.
I suppose iron is a sort of security,
the regular meals and Doctor’s care
a trade-off for the gazes of regulars and strangers alike:

observing your majesty from a safe distance
as your bowed back grows ever more silver,
removed from the nature of your birth—

nothing truly changing,
surroundings a static, fiberglass façade—

only waiting.
Just waiting.