a man came up to me today
and told me I might look prettier
if I coated my mirror
with the blood of the golden goose
and call me cynical
or a caveman
or a luddite
or whatever
but I didn’t believe him.

Crazy times of dime bag
dreams and fevered river
scenes that would drown
the lice in Bukowski's beard.

There was a quiet stretch of
sand on the Iowa River, not
far from downtown.
I pitched a tent in the woods
behind that little beach.
Blue herons and blue *****,
I hadn't been laid in a while.

A woman in a red one-piece
swimsuit used to come on
sunny days and lie in the sand
drinking Chardonnay.
I should have done like the
crawdaddy and backed
away.

I stumbled out of the woods
one afternoon, and began talking to
her and drinking her wine.
We laughed and drank under
that demented Iowa sun.
At night, we peeled off our
clothes and swam in the river with
the water snakes and ghosts that
floated down from the university.
I'm almost positive that
Dylan Thomas and Vonnegut
drank with us one night.
It could have just been
cholera or typhoid.

I built a fire after our swim, and we
danced naked and ****** next to an
old elm tree.
The otters and muskrats watched,
as the crawdaddyy slowly backed
away into the wine-soaked night.

The porch light clicks off behind me—
no ceremony,
no words wrapped in warmth,
just the hush of a door
never meant to stay open.

A moth dances in the dark.
I watch it,
wishing for wings
that don’t tear
in the cold.

My feet know this ache.
They’ve felt it before—
sidewalks splitting like dry lips,
a sky too wide
for someone so small.

I carry silence
in the crook of my arms,
like a child that won’t
stop crying.

The moon
presses its white face
against the windshield.
It doesn’t ask me to leave.

Every hour is a question
with no safe answer.
Where do I go
when even the night
runs out of room?

I’m tired
of learning the weight of keys
that don’t belong to me—
of knocking
on almosts.

If I disappear,
will the world blink?

Or will it just
keep driving?

the sacralisation of politics takes place when more or less elaborately and dogmatically, a political movement confers a sacred status on an earthly entity (the nation, the country, the state, humanity, society, race, proletariat, history, liberty, or revolution) and renders it an absolute principle of collective existence, considers it the main source of values for individual and mass behaviour, and exalts it as the supreme ethical precept of public life. Emillio Gentile