Radioactive Loveliness

The face across from me is beautiful,

So beautiful it strikes my lungs with pain,

Destroys desires for being dutiful—

Except for loyalty to loving’s stain.

I thought that beauty of this order could

Not be discovered in this modern day,

A time producing ordinary good,

OK, and fine, not excellence to spray

The heart with heavy metal bullets to

Irradiate it and to make it know

A crippled injury.  This face is true

To nothing but its fallout and its glow.

  My ribs are evanesced to open sores

    In flesh.  A nuclear lust licks my pores.