Across from me on the train this morning
a woman reading “Folly”—not mine—something
written by a man with white hair, and in hardback.
Hard. Hardness. A synthetic creation turns into a living
creature thanks to color, and lighting, and visual effects,
whispering come here, come here, and go away. Peculiarity.
Pink filling, clear finish powder filling,
silk tips with powder, paraffin, buff, gel.
O these happy grey delusions: wisteria drooping
down on the stupidity of the besotted. Tearing:
the big fluffy dumpling of dissatisfaction.
I move into the flow of tears (big deal) like
another art experiment in the etiology of
decoration. Girls scrumptious as rice …
the devilled day cares what I think …
this is a Manhattan-bound trainwreck.
The city is spread out in its usual
panorama, the epidermis of capital
in plain sight. You are closed and open in your
usual way and the hop of love is stamping
meanly (as usual). “I want string cheese.”
“I love string cheese.” “Do I get to be the monster?”
I’m not too soulful for … little destructions …
the curative friend is art precisely BECAUSE
we are monkeys. The art is complicated
precisely BECAUSE we have woken up, and
we have woken up
because we will go to sleep
and that was my point at the beginning.
I don’t care about cocks (so much) or bruises,
or that I’m all tangled. I’m not even sure
how much I care about you. (What did
you say your name was?) I care about
the TRANSOM—the air between us —
that little opening and the milky draft that got
through somehow. Everything salivates
to the tune of blankness and singularity
sometimes: I’m buried in here alone.
That’s incurable: a woman is of love,
the bargirl is a frog, some people are
just born happy and others feel every
scrape and filing in the demon’s lexicon.
Art as love. Pain. No more pain. Colored
lanterns: the experience of “wolving.”
The spine curves on a feather. I wish
I were as beautiful as your cruel speech.
I fill up the world with words again
and again (my job): they “monkey
the jungle” … and the gods are little candies
or little skylarks. O this jealous devotion
to waxwork sense, the lie of sonic
embodiment, the list of “universes”
in the flailing mooncalf. There’s something
cleaner than that, beyond your pat
“asymmetry” and cowboy rhetoric,
in the clumsy wash of being. Somewhere
a monk is rolling in iridescence and legroom.
Sex is like popcorn there and popcorn like
total overnight protection for the heavy flow
of ideation. It is indescribably boring that you
are not in love with me in the vermillion sea
of ebullient thinking. I like pain, really. Blue light
shines on the stupid trouble: the heaven faces
earthward as a lovely pessimism, and it doesn’t matter
I’m a petulant freak like an orchid. It doesn’t matter
because pain doesn’t matter, it’s a speckle on the death,
it’s artificial like a nylon egg. The most free live love
doesn’t scare anyone, it’s like seaweed waving in fire.
Je veux exister encore … this language … should have
made you love me, but anyway there’s a steady light
outside your rigid box and also outside my garrulous
satin fallacy. Your name will always be a shiver to me.
Now I need to sleep for a thousand years with a thousand
beautiful men—none of them you. The stars form a ring
around a beautiful device. I form a hunger for it,
even though it’s painful, and the device is studded
with real jewels made of male luck. The luck
is strafing over my open mouth. “Is it nice out? It’s
supposed to be nice out.” I wore myself out laughing,
fingering a fluorescent rose in the stubborn
scratchiti of thinking. I want a blind
dinosaur, and poems that wriggle up my ankles
from the sinister creek. Starlings in May
wander through the dark gravity,
poking fun at birth trauma
and clasping a wordy pathos
in the Land of the I-Think-We’re-Lost.
Otohime 