It’s true that anyone can fall
in love with anyone at all
Later, they can’t. Ouf, ouf.

How much mascara washes away each day
and internationally, making the blue one black.
Come on everybody. Especially you girls.

Each day I think of something about dying.
Does everybody? do they think that, I mean.
My friends! some answers. Gently
unstrap my wristwatch. Lay it face down.

I’d thought you’d get through any disagreement just by talking
by persisting quietly. Fool. Steel-rimmed the hole at the centre
through which all hopes of contact plummet down in flames
as modes of talk criss-cross from opposite directions like jets in flight
which rightly never slow or swerve to read the fleecy trails of others
then something searing wipes its arc across my sight again
as rape fields of acrylic flowers do stripe your eyeballs yellow
and unreflecting green takes charge at the horizon threatening to rain -
shove off or I soak you sunshine – suppose you stopped describing
something, would stopping free you from it, almost as if it hadn’t happened?
So is that shiver down the back of the neck water, or is it memory calling water
or is it squaring up to getting properly shredded, which does cut clean away
from iron edges soaking into rust, from blurring fiery wells of tin-work -
someone calling tell them I’m not home, hurt me so bad to see my baby get
away, ashen-mouthed, smoking regret – instead of all that tactile surface junk
there is this sobbing flash, you-die immediacy: who longs for decent
and consensual talk, it is that calm and democratic front I’d work to be:
I was not born to that.

Who anyone is or I am is nothing to the work. The writer
properly should be the last person that the reader or the listener need think about
yet the poet with her signature stands up trembling, grateful, mortally
embarrassed
and especially embarrassing to herself, patting her hair and twittering If, if only
I need not have a physical appearance! To be sheer air, and mousseline!
and as she frets the minute wars scorch on through paranoias of the unreviewed
herded against a cold that drives us in together – then pat me more, Coventry
to fall from Anglo-Catholic clouds of drifting we‘s high tones of feeling down
to microscopic horror scans of tiny shiny surfaces rammed up against the nose
cascading on Niagara, bobbed and jostled, racing rusted cans of Joseph Cotten
reels
charmed with his decent gleam: once we as incense-shrouded ectoplasm gets
blown
fresh drenched and scattered units pull on gloss coats to preen in their own
polymer:
still it’s not right to flare and quiver at some fictive ‘worldly boredom of the young’
through middle-aged hormonal pride of Madame, one must bleed, it’s necessary…
Mop mop georgette. The only point of holding up my blood is if you’d think So
what?
We’ve all got some of that: since then you’d each feel better; less apart. – Hardly:
it’s more for me to know that I have got some, like a textbook sexual anxiety
while the social-worker poet in me would like her revenge for having been born
and left.
What forces the lyric person to put itself on trial though it must stay rigorously
uninteresting?
Does it count on its dullness to seem human and strongly lovable; a veil for the
monomania
which likes to feel itself helpless and touching at times? Or else it backs off to get
sassy
since arch isn’t far from desperate: So take me or leave me. No, wait, I didn’t
mean leave
me, wait, just don’t – or don’t flick and skim to the foot of a page and then get up
to go -