I Was a Liar

after Delilah

It was your hair

I wanted. The heft of it.

Its rain beating down upon me

until I shut my eyes,

lids seamed with wet and glare.

The betrayal,

that came later –

an animal inside me bleating.

I muzzled the noise.

I smothered the silence.

My wild risk, my white lie:

God was with you –

I always knew that –

even when they strung you

up like a star,

blind and shorn.

You fevered through me,

those nights you hung there,

a split flesh, spasmodic,

forking.