I have sharpened my teeth ready to rip and tear
like soldiers and their swords

I am listening to the sound of the rain on the roof
while you fold your clothes to sad song about madness and memories and it is quiet in the house with the same kind of finality of
a lock clicking of
a door slamming of
a finished book

like a knife slicing through a teen on a Chicago city street at 1 am
no streetlights
no police
no gunshots

just this skin
this blood on asphalt
on sidewalk
on boy
on knife

just blood on the roof of this house like a warning
something wicked resides here do not come near
something that says dangerdangerdangerdanger

Never look back.
Never look here again,
there is something about you that keeps me coming back for more
like you are selling crack ******* on the street corners and
I am an addict panhandling

I know you will leave me when I am hopelessly in love
I know I will not be able to breathe without you.

Without the weight of your body and breath on mine
you will leave me peeled and gutted, spineless.
Every dream crushed like a body thrown from the 40th floor.

You will leave me like tsunamis leave islands,
like hurricanes leave cities,
like tornadoes leave houses

utterly destroyed from the core out,
and you?

You will leave like a bird from a nest.


Weightless.

some want it, I don't want it, I
want to do whatever it is I do
and just do it.
I don't want to look into the
adulating eye,
shake the sweating
palm.
I think that whatever I do
is my business.
I do it because if I don't
I'm finished.
I'm selfish:
I do it for myself
to save what is left of
myself.
and when I am
approached as
hero or
half-god or
guru
I refuse to accept
that.
I don't want their
congratulations,
their worship,
their companionship.

I may have half-a-
million readers,
a million,
two million.
I don't care.
I write the word
how I have to
write it.

and, in the
beginning,
when there were no
readers
I wrote the word
as I needed to write the
word
and if all
the half-million,
the million,
the two million,
disappear
I will continue to
write the
word
as I always have.

the reader is an
afterthought,
the placenta,
an accident,
and any writer who
believes otherwise
is a bigger fool than
his
following.

I hate you more
With every breathe you take
Every word you say
Every bruise you leave

I try so hard
To avoid hurt
I don't talk to many people at school
I don't stray far from my own little world

Just to come home, every day
To you screaming in my face
Your words linger in my ears
"I wish I didn't have you" ringing the most clear

I'm worthless, and lazy, you say
I'm selfish, because your sick
And I don't do enough to help you
By cooking the meals, and cleaning the house

Your injured, you say you fell,
So I need to step up,
And do more, to keep the stress off you
And help you heal

But you don't sound sick
When you yell at me
And you don't look injured,
When you hurt me

See? Your standing now
Yelling as you come near
Screaming right in my ear
The same old, tired words.

And as you push me,
And I fall
Only one thought rings clear
"You don't look sick, anymore, mommy dear"

I want to tell you about time, how strangely
it behaves when you haven't got much of it left:
after 60 say, or 70, when you'd think it would

find itself squeezed so hard that like melting
ice it would surely begin to shrink, each day
looking smaller and smaller - well, it's not so.

The rules change, a single hour can grow huge
and quiet, full of reflections like an old river,
its slow-turning eddies and whirls showing you

every face of your life in a fluid design -
your children for instance, how you see them
deepened and changed, not merely by age, but by

time itself, its wide and luminous eye; and you
realise at last that your every gift to them - love,
your very life, should they need it - will not

and cannot come back; it wasn't a gift at all
but a borrowing, a baton for them to pass on in
their turn. Look, there they are in this

shimmering distance, rushing through their kind
of time, moving faster than you yet not catching up.
You're alone. And slowly you begin to discern

the queer outline of what's to come: the bend in
the river beyond which, moving steadily, head up
(you hope), you will simply vanish from sight.

1670

In Winter in my Room
I came upon a Worm—
Pink, lank and warm—
But as he was a worm
And worms presume
Not quite with him at home—
Secured him by a string
To something neighboring
And went along.

A Trifle afterward
A thing occurred
I’d not believe it if I heard
But state with creeping blood—
A snake with mottles rare
Surveyed my chamber floor
In feature as the worm before
But ringed with power—

The very string with which
I tied him—too
When he was mean and new
That string was there—

I shrank—”How fair you are”!
Propitiation’s claw—
“Afraid,” he hissed
“Of me”?
“No cordiality”—
He fathomed me—
Then to a Rhythm Slim
Secreted in his Form
As Patterns swim
Projected him.

That time I flew
Both eyes his way
Lest he pursue
Nor ever ceased to run
Till in a distant Town
Towns on from mine
I set me down
This was a dream.