i.


dear poetry, we met when i was four,
you were count lestat, and it was love
at first sight. you were made of bone
and bane, and razors, i was a mosochist

and you were a black widow, i would
know, i was there, trying to pry
open all of your eight legs, looking
for the amrita.


ii.


dear poetry, if i were to answer all
of the thirteen questions you have ever
asked me, the answers would be,
no, no, yes, march the thirty second,
"how frail a human heart must be -",
diacetylmorphine without the butterfly,
mother, yes, barely, jolene, you don't
love me, contractility, and no.


iii.


dear poetry, you have pretty legs.


iv.


dear poetry, i am an ugly archetype of denuded
adolescence and i think you smell
like teenagers and a leather hacked smothered
in *** and black labels and ck perfume,
and a pound of god.


v.


dear poetry, if sleep is the brother to death,
where does my mother lie,
before ribbons of aubade
seek the flower in the sky?


vi.


dear poetry, today i don't think i love you anymore.


vii.


dear poetry, if you were humanised,
you would be ugly. you would be defleshed,
you would be ugly. you would be marked constantly by
ugly people and you would bleed ugly people.


viii.


dear poetry, today i might ******* my muses,
i might make them wear fishnet leggings,
with ****-me heels, i might give them *****
to suit others that **** them better than i do, and
it is all your fault.


ix.


dear poetry, i promise myself i would not speak
to you anymore, at least not in words, but
we both know poets are nothing but
liars, don't we?


x.


dear poetry, i am not a poet, all the poets are dead.

they died for you.


xi.


dear poetry, i am writting you thirteen letters
a year, they are ugly, like i am, they spell
an ugly word you would never speak of. you
will be anatomised, i will stuff you with
consangunuty, i will re-invent you.


xii.


dear poetry, you are older than me,
i am twenty, but you are only ten,
i am ripe, bruised, plucked from purple lips,
nothing is ageless.


xiii.*


dear poetry*, i am going to break you,
grind you in a mortar, roll you up,
into a blunt, and i am going to smoke
you along with the angels.

Somewhere beyond the dying embers light
A spark of hope will rescue me
Though the flames are now long since gone
The smoke still sets me free

An eternal flame now forever silenced
But a breeze of redemption blows my way
The darkness steals your name from my lips
But you memory still beckons me stay

The fire still burns within my soul
My breath filled with the ashes of rejection
The love I feel envelopes me whole
'Til the heat has scorched my reflection

Consumed by the flame that warmed my heart
As I burn but will not die
The smoke of regret fills the empty night
As it settles through this hollow sky

A spark of hope is all that I seek
To raise these embers once more
A gentle whisper will ignite the flames
'Til again this fire shall soar


© All Rights Reserved

The night is only a sort of carbon paper,
Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars
Letting in the light, peephole after peephole --
A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things.
Under the eyes of the stars and the moon's rictus
He suffers his desert pillow, sleeplessness
Stretching its fine, irritating sand in all directions.

Over and over the old, granular movie
Exposes embarrassments--the mizzling days
Of childhood and adolescence, sticky with dreams,
Parental faces on tall stalks, alternately stern and tearful,
A garden of buggy rose that made him cry.
His forehead is bumpy as a sack of rocks.
Memories jostle each other for face-room like obsolete film stars.

He is immune to pills: red, purple, blue --
How they lit the tedium of the protracted evening!
Those sugary planets whose influence won for him
A life baptized in no-life for a while,
And the sweet, drugged waking of a forgetful baby.
Now the pills are worn-out and silly, like classical gods.
Their poppy-sleepy colors do him no good.

His head is a little interior of grey mirrors.
Each gesture flees immediately down an alley
Of diminishing perspectives, and its significance
Drains like water out the hole at the far end.
He lives without privacy in a lidless room,
The bald slots of his eyes stiffened wide-open
On the incessant heat-lightning flicker of situations.

Nightlong, in the granite yard, invisible cats
Have been howling like women, or damaged instruments.
Already he can feel daylight, his white disease,
Creeping up with her hatful of trivial repetitions.
The city is a map of cheerful twitters now,
And everywhere people, eyes mica-silver and blank,
Are riding to work in rows, as if recently brainwashed.

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to **** you.
You died before I had time ----
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off the beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My ****** friend

Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene

An engine, an engine,
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You ----

Not God but a *******
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the *****.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.

If I've killed one man, I've killed two ----
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagersnever liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you *******, I'm through.

"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)"

Lying, thinking
Last night
How to find my soul a home
Where water is not thirsty
And bread loaf is not stone
I came up with one thing
And I don't believe I'm wrong
That nobody,
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.

Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.

There are some millionaires
With money they can't use
Their wives run round like banshees
Their children sing the blues
They've got expensive doctors
To cure their hearts of stone.
But nobody
No, nobody
Can make it out here alone.

Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.

Now if you listen closely
I'll tell you what I know
Storm clouds are gathering
The wind is gonna blow
The race of man is suffering
And I can hear the moan,
'Cause nobody,
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.

Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.