THIN WALLS
The moon falls into its watery black grave,
and the failed novelist auctions off his pen to no one.
Acorns lash against the roof
as if the trees are rolling dice.
The neighbor moans love’s graffiti onto white walls:
A stranger’s hands that feel right
much too fast for it to be safe. Their shrieking rises
to the surface to eat from your fingers.
The whole house rattles, and my chair.
Every cat in the neighborhood is in heat.
My lover’s laziness dabbles like a poor man’s time.
With clean, clean hands, he brews terrible coffee.
With his irreparable gaze upon me, he says
he begins to love every woman he makes love to.
Don’t pity me if I never leave.
BETRAYAL
Can we admit we've already begun living
like cowards at gunpoint, like two myths
who'd rather sleep than fight? In our world
fog is air trying to escape the earth,
fog is air too expensive to breathe.
But I know too well the weight of your bones in the dark
when you think I've caught a beautiful woman in your lap;
the religion you love yourself with—lost in the rosaries
on the dresser in a bowl of keys that open no doors.
Betrayal is coming. Your bootprints leave gray-faced
ladies on the steps. Any place you dress up for,
I am not allowed.
Eventually anything you love becomes cumbersome,
unless you haven't touched it. Isn't that why we look out
the windows for schoolgirls laughing in the rain,
why we claim the moon is God's eye?
If the moon was ours, we'd litter on it,
and drill holes through it. If you were God,
I'd be a whore with an gargantuan tongue.
If you were a puppet,
I'd leave your spine like an unswept floor.
If you were a soldier, I'd shrink your uniform.
If you were a lifeguard, I'd drown you.
If you were a thief, I'd steal your hipbones.
Betray me. I'm prepared as the icicles hanging
from the sky's railroad. And when I fall,
some innocent thing will slice open.
But we're not finished yet. I'd kiss her
behind my back too. I'd lie to her for a compliment.
Haven't we already fed the animal we raised
without knowing it, held the unnamed stone
the sea spit up, and witnessed the statue of Mary
bleed and cry? Superstition is all around us.
Can't your hear the tree frogs humping in the streets,
and the crickets panting in the Spanish Moss telling us
that someday our vision will be too perfect to run them over?
THE ELEGY YOU'LL NEVER WRITE
1.
If only your cancer moon's remission
was an hour late, God's crystal ball
would have been less lethargic,
the rooftop hooligans
would've exhausted their heckling.
You'd have held me in the grass,
and listened to the delirious pond-frogs
argue like drunk fisherman,
but you pushed me to the ground
next to my imaginary lover,
then covered the windows with paper.
And I woke in a stranger's bed
without a ceiling or a priest or an address.
I woke the woman I wanted to be
drunk as a gypsy
with a jukebox for an alarm clock,
a debilitated god on my back,
a gaudy purse and women friends
who will never marry again. We dance
until something breaks,
a chair or a virgin's silly heart.
Then we leap away like lady fish.
Our fine silver scales,
our terminal mouths
prohibit us from inhaling your pity.
2.
The future has already broken its neck.
I never rest. Dwarfs sleep on my couch
with miserable eyes. I tell them:
Though he is a coward,
my lover is still my lover,
an exhausted landlord with screws
holding up his head. O Jimmy,
blubber-headed buck from Biloxi.
Chameleon. Fraud. King Mackerel.
You will abandon your entire school
soon enough. Who knows you better?
Your chicken skins and shrunken jackets,
your bloated belly and gravedigger's liquor,
your love for hogging and gun show hosts,
your knuckle-dick records and Mississippi stutter.
Your blood is 90 proof, single barrel grease.
Do you think you've left me in peace,
naked on the church pew, no longer
punished by your strange heart?
3.
Don't follow me. Don't mess up my hair.
The whole world is a mile away
and not enough branches litter the streets.
Not enough men drain the flooded gutters.
The canyons fill up like a coward's throat.
The planes do not fly low enough to shut you up.
Wear something that lets the world know you belong to me.
Stop smoking. Dry the plates. We will be on time.
I love you, but I don't want to be here.
Pride feels sorry for us. I'm sorry too.
So sorry. I always have been. Always will be.
Every man is too tolerant to love, too thin
to hold, too beautiful to know me better than you.
Because you may not have
known me at all, I will not die soon enough
with a stale cock in my mouth,
the one your pride chose for me.
I feed the terrible
children and the dogs with my bare breast.
But I will never please you.
4.
I'm no longer your god-mother, your fishing lure, your pawn, your orphan
Hybrid, your headless Myrtle, the creek too dumb to spit out garbage,
your perennial, the nurse who cut your umbilical cord, your chef, your bus
stop, your therapist, your junk-drawer, a hole to fill with infertile gas.
I am your madness, your unpolished silverware, evil's lack of love,
your erection, the broken down car that fixes itself over night,
the unfertilized seed, the Hardy Hibiscus, the Moonflower,
your Snapdragon lullaby, your lie without a truth, your prayer,
your unmade bed, your regret.
I am the end of the world, your second birth, the past future, January's
Janus,Hodini's witch child (Alfàbrega i valeriana, menta i ruda), the last
king of queens, the Angler Fish, from where did I evolve? Your holiday,
your mess, your Artemis. No matter how awkwardly the moon rests in my
eyes, I can always see you.
5.
Are we moving on? If we are
I know the woman for you.
What else is there for her to do
but remember where you left your shoes?
She has dead bird's hair, and like you,
cares what everyone thinks. She's falls asleep.
The party stopples over her. No one asks her name.
She's poor but pays your bills with her husband's cash.
How you hate the rich, but write poems for them,
How you hate the rich, but dress up for them
in brass gasoline and washable suits.
I won't follow you when you drive her home.
Quiet women scare me.
She's so sweet she'll make you sick.
So masturbate all over her.
You're too ill to be sorry,
too defiant, and she is too mute
to ask why everyone you touch goes mad.
6.
I am no longer superstitious,
but I am not mad Jimmy.
Even though God is brushing my hair in the dark,
I cut my hair myself. I lie. I drink
until someone else's future.
My body is a church. The sinners pour in.
One of them will have the guts to love me
without a clock in his eye, a decent man
who knows the Ladyfish crumbles at his lips,
who shaves the hair on his neck
because he thinks it reminds me of you.
7.
So many open mouths to console me.
And your voice so far from me now
that tonight could be the first night
you pretend to sleep with a lit cigarette,
the first night I kiss your impotent limb,
or the next when you sleep on the bus stop
outside my door. Tonight if we meet
for the first time I will tell you:
If this is what you meant by peace,
I'd rather die in an argument.
If this is what you meant by peace,
how ungrateful was I?
8.
How badly did I translate
from the brash woman I am
to the nervous woman you made love to?
In what language would I be enough?
I am too young to die, too loved by you still
for any other body to wake me.
So, politely kill me, then rush off
to no where. Who will help you?
Don't look at me with your faithless eyes
unless you can love me
when I have nothing to give you.
Your doubts will rest with me
beneath the earth.
The stars are the devil's work.
Anything that outlives us
is not beautiful anymore.