We smile at each other
and I lean back against the wicker couch.
How does it feel to be dead? I say.
You touch my knees with your blue fingers.
And when you open your mouth,
a ball of yellow light falls to the floor
and burns a hole through it.
Don't tell me, I say. I don't want to hear.
Did you ever, you start,
wear a certain kind of dress
and just by accident,
so inconsequential you barely notice it,
your fingers graze that dress
and you hear the sound of a knife cutting paper,
you see it too
and you realize how that image
is simply the extension of another image,
that your own life
is a chain of words
that one day will snap.
Words, you say, young girls in a circle, holding hands,
and beginning to rise heavenward
in their confirmation dresses,
like white helium balloons,
the wreathes of flowers on their heads spinning,
and above all that,
that's where I'm floating,
and that's what it's like
only ten times clearer,
ten times more horrible.
Could anyone alive survive it?

When I see you again I’ll be sure to make it worth your while
Show you what you missed, what you failed to see time after time
And then you’ll wish you could take it all back
To those nights I held you close,
but baby you made your choice.
When you see me again,
don't look my way,
dont bother to say,
all the things that slipped away.
And I’ll be seeing you again,
you’ll carry me with you,
But that’s not something I’m used to.

I'm sitting on the edge
of my bed, trembling and
     flash [I'm huddled in the
                kitchen corner, she's
                advancing on me, blocking
                every way of escape]
wishing I could be ok again, wishing
I wasn't damaged beyond
     flash [I'm on the
                stairs, crouched over so
                she can't reach my
                stomach because I'm already
                crying hard enough to almost
                be throwing up, gagging
                around screams]
any kind of repair that I
can foresee, praying that
     flash [I'm curled on my bed like
                a foetus, I ran away until
                there was no further
                to run and still
                she followed me. Hit
                my back, it hurts
                the least there]
the terror will pass, and I
won't have to remember
     flash [I'm thinking desperately
                around the thumps of
                knuckles on flesh and the screams
                I can't contain that next time I
                will hit back I won't
                be frozen in place, wishing
                bitterly I wasn't shamelessly
                lying to myself]
this.*
     *flash [I can't breathe.]

In love, nothing exists between heart and heart.
Speech is born out of longing,
True description from the real taste.
The one who tastes, knows;
the one who explains, lies.
How can you describe the true form of Something
In whose presence you are blotted out?
And in whose being you still exist?
And who lives as a sign for your journey?

Under the parabola of a ball,
a child turning into a man,
I looked into the air too long.
The ball fell in my hand, it sang
in the closed fist: Open Open
Behold a gift designed to ****.

Now in my dial of glass appears
the soldier who is going to die.
He smiles, and moves about in ways
his mother knows, habits of his.
The wires touch his face: I cry
NOW. Death, like a familiar, hears


And look, has made a man of dust
of a man of flesh. This sorcery
I do. Being ******, I am amused
to see the centre of love diffused
and the wave of love travel into vacancy.
How easy it is to make a ghost.


The weightless mosquito touches
her tiny shadow on the stone,
and with how like, how infinite
a lightness, man and shadow meet.
They fuse. A shadow is a man
when the mosquito death approaches