If this poem is funny,
I’d like you to laugh, but if it’s
deadly, I’d prefer you to
wait until after my turn
to die.
If it is emotional, then do whatever you do
in that situation
quietly.
Recently cyan kisses assault me
from a formless mouth I never see
and a quenching tongue I never taste,
only when awake do such things affect my
favorite oxytocin.
Nancy sleeps past noon when she can manage
while I pretend that I, too, am unconscious
and forgiving.
My patience is reasonable, so I leave
maybe for breakfast,
for a book,
or just leave.
So far, I’ve not left without saying
I’m going, I’m gone.
I like it that way:
me predictable
and her perpetually unthinkable.
When I think of real,
I imagine it’s similar to my contented lonesome mornings
next to sleeping Nancy,
the nothingness that
does not move me in white still death,
sleeping away her ordinary time
in her ordinary home.
From time to time,
a disruptive coo lets me know
we’re anything at all.
On most days, I’m cuckolded,
rod electric struck
electric, and I feel
too much too often, practice control
and fail.
Our misery is more joyful than joy;
misery pervades at the cusp of living and not,
the endless carnival of cheap stints interspersed with
yellow birds with yellow pills that
die on the sidewalk half the time.
I don’t believe in an Intelligence,
just our craftinesses sustaining.
I believe in Words, fucking, farting, shitting
rotting, rotting, rotting,
bones and worms and dirt and threads
outlasting our aspirations.
Why, I do still laugh
as you can tell.
Life itself may just be death smiling,
smiling because there are all these distractions
so you don’t sit around wondering,
why bother caring for the body and accounts,
why spend the majority of your day performing tasks that poison nature?
For that matter, why should you ever select a spouse?
It’s what I wanted every year for Christmas and my birthday, but
the dream I’m dreaming is so powerful, it has kept me alive
despite my suicides
rationalized.
You may rarely admit such depressings,
yet I mask my truth with adept to prevent
misunderstandings.
Why do,
or did,
I love someone
that doesn’t exist in their own minds?
When I sing to myself
when I move my hands verily,
when I split my fingertips on the sedimentary knife,
I am whole again.
If I write a poem
or read someone’s story,
there is so much more added to me than
a frail woman’s company.
There is much more added than
the bills and rent and food and gas could take,
and if being alone is wrong,
I don’t want to be right
beside the bank with a gun and ski mask
black on white skin torched by
the summer haze sun.
If none of this made sense, well, I don’t
need to impress you or provide
any educational value
anymore.
I’ll just smile in my mahogany mirror,
knowing that Ohio
is not for me.
