To you, it is a spectacle
You watch with congealed disgust and cloying pity
Perverse satisfaction oozes from your pores
But you dare not to push back the velvet curtain
And glance behind its inky whisper
For you know deep in the soft malleable crevasses of your mind
That the walls will stand firm with time,
That the flowers breathe,
That the lamps light.

You compare each life like photographic negatives
Whispering affirmations
My dishes are whole
My walls are smooth
My curtains match
Standing ***** on a pedestal of entitlement
A halo of ivy above your eyes
Gleaming incisors bared.

You meditate only on the dysfunction
You hear only raised voices
You see only the shards, never the whole
But behind that silky curtain are eddying currents of actuality
Fluidly changing
Even as you enjoy the show.

i heard that women tend to
tell lies more often than men,
but when they to, it's to build
other people up, while men usually
lie to make themselves look better

so at midnight, when you said
that you loved me, and i told you
that i loved you too, which one
of us was really in the wrong?

And yet the books will be there on the shelves, separate beings,
That appeared once, still wet
As shining chestnuts under a tree in autumn,
And, touched, coddled, began to live
In spite of fires on the horizon, castles blown up,
Tribes on the march, planets in motion.
“We are, ” they said, even as their pages
Were being torn out, or a buzzing flame
Licked away their letters. So much more durable
Than we are, whose frail warmth
Cools down with memory, disperses, perishes.
I imagine the earth when I am no more:
Nothing happens, no loss, it’s still a strange pageant,
Women’s dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley.
Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born,
Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.

How wise I am to have instructed the butler
to instruct the first footman to instruct the second
footman to instruct the doorman to order my carriage;
I am about to volunteer a definition of marriage.
Just as I know that there are two Hagens, Walter and Copen,
I know that marriage is a legal and religious alliance entered
into by a man who can't sleep with the window shut and a
woman who can't sleep with the window open.
Moreover, just as I am unsure of the difference between
flora and fauna and flotsam and jetsam,
I am quite sure that marriage is the alliance of two people
one of whom never remembers birthdays and the other
never forgetsam,
And he refuses to believe there is a leak in the water pipe or
the gas pipe and she is convinced she is about to asphyxiate
or drown,
And she says Quick get up and get my hairbrushes off the
windowsill, it's raining in, and he replies Oh they're all right,

it's only raining straight down.
That is why marriage is so much more interesting than divorce,
Because it's the only known example of the happy meeting of
the immovable object and the irresistible force.
So I hope husbands and wives will continue to debate and
combat over everything debatable and combatable,
Because I believe a little incompatibility is the spice of life,
particularly if he has income and she is pattable.

you could try not to be
exactly who you are
but we all know
you can't.
you are only sweeter
when you spend your time
with better friends.
get there.

Let us go now into the forest.
Trees will pass by your face,
and I will stop and offer you to them,
but they cannot bend down.
The night watches over its creatures,
except for the pine trees that never change:
the old wounded springs that spring
blessed gum, eternal afternoons.
If they could, the trees would lift you
and carry you from valley to valley,
and you would pass from arm to arm,
a child running
from father to father.