with iambs jumping in his hair like fleas,
with all the revisions of his body
unsaying him,
walks to the podium.
He is about to tell us
how he came to this.
Similar Posts
The experience of fear is not an observer of it; he is fear itself, the very instrument of fear.
In dreams I descendinto the cave of my past:a child with a morgue-tagon its toe,the terrible metal squeakingof the morgue-drawers,& the chilly basement& the slam of doors.Or else I am setting up dreamhouse,with the wifeof my second ex-husband.She complains of himwith breaking sorrow-& I comfort her.(She only married him, it seems, for me).Sometimes I wake…
I am happiest
where the changing lightreminds me of my death& the fact that it need not be fatal-yet I perch herein the midst of the citywhere the traffic dulls my senses,where my ears scream at sirens,where transistor radio blastsinvade my poemslike alien war chants.But I never walkthe streets of New Yorkwithout hoping for the endof the world.How…
I put our books face to face
They whispered about us.I put yours on top of mine.They would not mate.Like poor dumb pandas in the London Zoo,they would not come together.I put them back to back.They would not sleep.I put them right side up to upside down.They would not lick each other’s wounds.The night we metyou fed me fish eggs & dark…
I sit at home
as I used to doon many sunday afternoonswhen you came back to me,your arms ached for me,and your arms would close me inthough they smelled of other women.I think of youon Sunday afternoons.Your sweet head would bow,like a child somehow,down to me –and your hair and your eyes were wild.We would embrace on the floor-You…
Looking for a place
the inner dialogue,the monologueof futures & regrets,of pasts not past enough& futures that may never cometo pass,we found this boatbobbing in the blue,this refuge amid reefs,this white hullwithin this azure sibilance of sea,this central rockingso like the rockingbefore birth.Venus was born of the waters,borne over themto teach us about love-our only sailon the seas of…
Meathooks, notebooks,
& spectral bombshitting that patch of riverI see from my eastern window.The poets are dead, the city dying.Anne, Sylvia, Keatswith his passionate lungs,Berryman jumping from the bridge & waving,all the dreamers deadof their own dreams.Why have I stayed on as Horatio?Anne sends poems from the grave,Sylvia, letters.John Keats’s ghostly coughcomes through the wall board.What am…