Receive it, my impatient heart--
receive it as it comes.
Do not worry, pulsing thing,
straining against that chest
you inhabit.  Incubate;
let the body prepare you:
Beat calmly where you lie.
Be comfortable, my eager heart,
my vibrating, warm little heart.

Love only knocks once.
Maybe she can be scouted-
out thereafter, sought and
captured tearfully, like a dog
reunited with the master
whom he'd thought was dead--but
she only knocks once, and then,
I think, gives up.  The universe
gives up.  I cannot will love back to me.

This isn't a poem.  Seriously, where'd he go?

as o'ergrown with lust
my childish spirit yet
has been naively quick to trust
and slow to feel regret...

Character development
is truly an undertaking.
Perhaps an incomplete
person cannot develop
another, after all--even
one who is not real.

A tiny devil lands
on my shoulder;
having no counter-
part, she stands

                               and, as I walk
                               at rabbit's pace
                               to the old place
                               where we used to talk,

                                                          ­          she drags from
                                                            ­        her cigarette,
                                                      ­              flicking it,
                                                             ­       hum-drum.

"He ain't comin',"
she says,
and ashes
on my neck.

                               "Don't need him,"
                               I lie--should lie
                               down to die,
                               but light up instead.

Unconvinced,
she scoffs at me.
"Then what do you need?"
And a dreadful wind

                                             slithers through
                                             the fissure,
                                             icy, bitter.
                                             "I don't need you."

                                                          ­                      The woods, too
                                                             ­                   are dead, like us--
                                                            ­                    a Winter-sheared husk
                                                            ­                    through and through.

You'll come, I hope,
leaning over
the grove, or
maybe I don't.

                                      You'll come, I hope,
                                       leaning over
                                       the grove, or
                                       maybe you won't.

Nothing here
and nothing there;
nothing then
and nothing now.

Should I return
or should I stay,
bleakness prevails.
And so I say,

"I am embodiment
of will;
I am alive;
I cannot be still.

Everything here,
everything now!
I am I,"
and hear it resound.