loving you was hard enough;
not loving you,
infinitely harder.

You thought I needed something from you
But we met by the canal in the night
You though I needed something from you
But I didn't need light
You thought I needed something from you
But you gave it to me
From your chest coursed all the words and sweetness of loss and life
The message I needed to move on to the next world
And though I never saw your face (in that dark)
I won't forget.

dear one
already you're
becoming no one

and I adjust
to yet another
kind of loneliness

the many memories
of your face inspire
faint longing and
a shiver of dread

somewhere you
go about your day
and there our joy's at most
a dissipating footnote
of confused regret

Eros is madness,
but madness isn't Eros.

Love makes worlds
give birth.

You are the dream of a dream.

My love can dream better.

Be what you like.

You're no dream of mine,
with your gift of backwards
running
time.

And if you're guided by guilt rather than love
then think on your hands, which touched me
under false
pretenses.

As they will the next one, and the next.

I won't paralyze your pleasure
seeking with truth--God, *****
what you will--

How can I really condemn your half-
truths and your weaknesses, It's
you that said of others "We all
do our best, that's not enough,"
it wasn't I.

Fool yourself if you like.

I'd rather lose you and keep truth
--much rather.

it's a second body sometimes,
a kind of chandelier of eczema,
tumbling from my shoulders
like a ragged royal robe,
white, shining, drifting scales

and this time I wear it
as a familiar dress,
put on me or
grown on me,
a lifeless moss,
scabs without passion,
drooping, dragging,
not reaching far,
not covering, not enobling

for in the deep sky where my soul lives
I've found an island to touch on,
an island filled with a swirling climbing hole
which is a road in time.

and I keep flying up to the surface,
surface of what I can hardly say,
to feel the wind (or what) buffet
and whip us back and forth
on the edge.

somehow you're there on the island too
yet you're not here, are you?
you don't know that you're there,
you don't know that it's there.
Only I've found its rocks,
that say "Yes" when touched,
the road that flows.

And so I wear this ragged dress,
not quite white,
showing and engrossing all,
and I can't help but stoop.
I slouch around my soul in prayer,
to stay close to it.
and if it hurts, it hurts.
I can bear it.

Some of us have the luxury of vulnerability,
sweet, but ripe
for invasion and colonization, or simply
a day of pillaging here and there.

Others are hard and dry, knowing, already been there before,
already having tried.

Others are keen-eyed, looming over,
tasting it already on their tongues in anticipation,
the fragments of words rippling over the edge,
watching your eyes and your squirms and your sighs,
seeking the entrance to groans and writhing--
or the hall of sorrows, well-locked ossuaries, or sky gardens of private joys.

Some of us know what's what, this goes here and that goes there,
like it or not, know when to stop, now, early, soon,
the knife cuts
here,
in the fruit,
to pierce the skin and separate the skin and the flesh and the pit,
nevermind what it was, now it is something else,
more purposeful in the mouth,
and while once it was the seed of a tree to climb in the sky,
now it is something new and so we will grasp it, display it
and eat it.