William Taylor Jr.

Our Secret Places

Tell me something pretty like you mean it
because we’re cut loose and drifting

wading through terrors and half-bred joys
strewn about the landscape like 
somebody’s garbage

I hear the dark’s been asking around
it knows our names
our numbers

all our secret places

The day is coming 
when we’ll be 86’d from every 
heart and every bar

and there will be a reckoning

and we’re as guilty as any guilty thing
that was ever naked beneath the slivered moon 
blinking in the judgment of the sun.