I hover

Somewhere the phone starts ringing, loud,
it is early morning, we are in a Swedish room on a hard perhaps-good-for-you Swedish mattress, those goddamn Swedes, and
the phone starts ringing. It hurts the annals between my ears.
To be able to encase these records, hundreds, thousands, goddamn thousands, in tobacco and love-making and moldmust sleep, I need this. When I am awake, my thoughts poke at the bark of my eyes,
my eyes are always barking,
as the corners of books, incisors and pages, the encyclopedia of ugly and girlish suburban trauma.
You, asleep in cotton and the dirt of  mid-state, wrap
your square big boy hands around my ears. You do this and you are still asleep. You do this to keep me from hearing the morning news.

Suppose one could say I have spent my life looking up up up and up a bell tower. White kisses from pigeon ass, God's dandruff, the spit of an altar boy who licked church walls and found them lacking. These careen wildly downward into my hair. And maybe, for a long time, that phone would have meant that: news, bells, new news of coming bells, coming men, a coming cavalry I would tire of completely and spit in another's eye, I am so used to holding bad flavors under my tongue. And maybe I would have blamed you for robbing me of that, when you covered my ears. The frabjous day! But you knew something deeper, you knew I needed not to hear it, you knew and you were hardly you, asleep so square and thin with bitumite greek hair on a damp hard mattress. You continue, today I leaned against those prodigious man thighs of lightning while you slept. You continue to block out false bells, you opened that bow mouth and let loose some arrows: "You're my girl. Swear it?" The bells of rutting time.