Category: Love

My body is in debate: This house believes
that love is an enviable fever…
Last night my chest was an office on fire.
My pillow hurt. I couldn’t save the documents.
Now it is day again. The room has furniture
and I have ins and outs.

Is that the knife-grinder, grinding his knives
outside the window, or the sound
of my heart cooling down?
If I were in a novel you’d travel three days
by horse and carriage to see me. If you were in a novel
I’d die somewhere in these middle chapters.

The man in the bathroom,
his words are waiting
the way pips are suspended in the throat of an apple.

He spits into the sink.
Who is this man. Where is this bathroom.
He throws something into the bin from a distance.

His heartbeat vibrates little waves through the bathwater.
He is an island, after all.
The sound of his blood in his ears is a fuzzy,
high-pitched sound.

A voice from the next room calls out
come here.
Whose voice is this.
What do they want from him.

There is a pain between his shoulder blades.
It is a central pain, where wings would sprout from.

When he closes his eyes
he is in a room of people in identical clothes
refusing to dissect cow hearts –
their purpleness, their unromantic shapes.

It is a hot, bright day
and the smell of blood fills the air, or seems to.

Underwater he is rehearsing
once again
the moment he will pour forth words, which will be arrows,
which lodge in the thigh of a princess,

who looks at them but doesn’t feel pain.
The brain tells the body a lie. The brain
tells the eyes a lie.

The heart continues to beat
after it is removed from the body
like a mouth failing over and over again to find words.

(After R Perry)

How many poems sleep in dictionaries
buried like needles in hay
How many poets not yet born
rolled in tight webs of confusion
How many tender confessions there
How many small unkindnesses
How many games

And what unexplored
uninhabited
deserts of silences

(after Anna Kamieńska)

I have a soft roll on my desk
which two or three times
I’ve squeezed very gently
when no one is looking
butter
sprinkle of salt
soup
dream
the price of gold is falling
I can’t see behind me out the window
but the reflection
on the floor suggests
intermittent sun
tomorrow
I will sit on the museum steps
and read
last week
a pigeon actually flew into my chest
an avocado on my desk
is playing dead and prehistoric
another politician
has behaved terribly
later
I will take an online personality test
and do better
turns out the sky is falling down
in fat pieces
later
I will be caught in a vicious cycle
of removing strawberry pips from my teeth
with strawberries
later
moving through the rain reading the texts from a person
who is the person I fell in love with
I will be electric in the world

The party I skipped,
so we never met,
the ballets we saw alone,
years in which we swam
over and under

never breaking surface,
slippy with youth, one kiss
an island between two deeps,
the birds wheeling, a fish leaping,
there, in the Before.

I’m copying down my memories.
Old visions are not all good ones.
The spring sunlight that warms my fingers
also falls across today’s empty bed.

Between the window’s outside and inside
a fragment of the world is suspended.
As I reach to touch it
the beautiful thing gallops away.

I keep gazing at everything.
My heart reluctantly whispers
but love hushes it.

Today returns;
yesterday is a blur;
I can’t imagine the shape of tomorrow.

At first
I feared I couldn’t let you touch me without ruining me,
so I didn’t let you touch me at all.

It’s when you’re on the brink of something
that you lose your balance.
When my body can’t bring itself to say what it needs to,
my heart plays Russian Roulette with my throat.
I swear bullets tore through me all of those nights
they went right through me, the marks are still here.
They refuse to fade
like the one, from your teeth, on my hand.

Someday, I’ll show you the bullet I would have taken for you,
after time has done the wash.
I’ll take it out of the jar of missed opportunities.
We’ll hold it up to the light.
You’ll roll it around your mouth like a fallen tooth perhaps.
I won’t forgive you exactly,
but we’ll laugh about how small it is.
We’ll wonder how such a short thing
could ever have meant so much.