Your love
compels me

to love myself

Those who leave us for no reason are also born without reason.

the flesh covers the bone
and they put a mind
in there and
sometimes a soul,
and the women break
vases against the walls
and the men drink too
much
and nobody finds the
one
but keep
looking
crawling in and out
of beds.
flesh covers
the bone and the
flesh searches
for more than
flesh.

there's no chance
at all:
we are all trapped
by a singular
fate.

nobody ever finds
the one.

the city dumps fill
the junkyards fill
the madhouses fill
the hospitals fill
the graveyards fill

nothing else
fills.

this time has finished me.
I feel like the German troops
whipped by snow and the communists
walking bent
with newspapers stuffed into
worn boots.
my plight is just as terrible.
maybe more so.
victory was so close
victory was there.
as she stood before my mirror
younger and more beautiful than
any woman I had ever known
combing yards and yards of red hair
as I watched her.
and when she came to bed
she was more beautiful than ever
and the love was very very good.
eleven months.
now she's gone
gone as they go.

this time has finished me.
it's a long road back
and back to where?
the guy ahead of me
falls.
I step over him.
did she get him too?

No allusions to talking sticks,
or metaphors of a chrome plated god,
because it's only life.

I can make use of a woman
with supple ankles stepping off the bus
kindling my hips and heart,

(but you've heard that one before,)
and, it's only life, so this might
just read like an instruction manual,

or both halves of a confessional,
but there will be no use made
of dancing dogs or moonlight

in battle, because it's only life,
and I have never really known
what it is I want to say to you.

It’s something like, "I love you,"
but asides from just being
very frightening to say,

I also think, it's more.
If it's only life, it's also
only death,

and what can be said that penetrates
death. What can be said
that won't collapse like engine failure

in the span between you and I,
if I try to say an "I love you"
that's truer than death.

Wordsworth bubbled in my cellophanate bath water
yesterday, at the candled hour.

whilst horse tails whinnied from Joshua Bell—
Tchaikovsky in brood, 1878.

Oh, but if I had thought to Bogart the whole affair, well,
I'd be a modern Michelangelo, a downright da Vinci—

a Dostoyevsky before the dawn—

propped between the cold **** and the hot,
wet behind the ears.

Then I turn the note-the page-the scene:
Don't try this at home, they echo in the shackles of

celebrity. A drowning horse has sounded better
than their confession of our normality.