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I live up here And a little bit to the left And I go down only For the accidents and then Never a moment too soon Just the same it's a life it's plenty The stairs the petals she loves me Every time Nothing has changed Oh down there down there Every time The glass knights lie by their gloves of blood In the pans of the scales the helmets Brim over with water It's perfectly fair The pavements are dealt out the dice Every moment arrive somewhere You can hear the hearses getting lost in lungs Their bells stalling And then silence comes with the plate and I Give what I can Feeling It's worth it For I see What my votes the mice are accomplishing And I know I'm free This is how I live Up here and simply Others do otherwise Maybe

Our embrace lasted too long. We loved right down to the bone. I hear the bones grind, I see our two skeletons. Now I am waiting till you leave, till the clatter of your shoes is heard no more. Now, silence. Tonight I am going to sleep alone on the bedclothes of purity. Aloneness is the first hygienic measure. Aloneness will enlarge the walls of the room, I will open the window and the large, frosty air will enter, healthy as tragedy. Human thoughts will enter and human concerns, misfortune of others, saintliness of others. They will converse softly and sternly. Do not come anymore. I am an animal very rarely.

I look at the world From awakening eyes in a black face— And this is what I see: This fenced-off narrow space Assigned to me. I look then at the silly walls Through dark eyes in a dark face— And this is what I know: That all these walls oppression builds Will have to go! I look at my own body With eyes no longer blind— And I see that my own hands can make The world that's in my mind. Then let us hurry, comrades, The road to find.

I look for you early, my rock and my refuge, offering you worship morning and night; before your vastness I come confused and afraid, for you see the thoughts of my heart. What could the heart and tongue compose, or spirit’s strength within me to suit you? But song soothes you and so I’ll give praise to your being as long as your breath-in-me moves.

I looked up from my writing, And gave a start to see, As if rapt in my inditing, The moon's full gaze on me. Her meditative misty head Was spectral in its air, And I involuntarily said, 'What are you doing there?' 'Oh, I've been scanning pond and hole And waterway hereabout For the body of one with a sunken soul Who has put his life-light out. 'Did you hear his frenzied tattle? It was sorrow for his son Who is slain in brutish battle, Though he has injured none. 'And now I am curious to look Into the blinkered mind Of one who wants to write a book In a world of such a kind.' Her temper overwrought me, And I edged to shun her view, For I felt assured she thought me One who should drown him too.

I love all beauteous things, I seek and adore them; God hath no better praise, And man in his hasty days Is honoured for them. I too will something make And joy in the making; Altho’ to-morrow it seem Like the empty words of a dream Remembered on waking.

Sometimes we blubbered through the fallout of willful confusion in pants that didn’t fit the legs we sawed off. We looked at each other and fell forward and back, forward and back, a little bit like dancing and a little like aggravated assault. At times it seemed reasonable because it always seems reasonable to accept whatever anxieties or losses must accumulate in the face of what we really wanted all along. In buildings and on streets you could paint a few eyes on a face and see the careless representation of brothers and sisters making a family out of paint and the gracious mistakes of seeing. Mistakes, the essence of sight, could have been all we had to go on anyway, and not for us to leave behind what took us through the shower of dumbasses with tact and a breath of elegance, even the hope that later, when the streets cleared of agitated needlers and the AC kicked on for good, we could sleep on the clothes spangled outside the closet and find a reason for closing the bedroom door on shadows of pedantic radiation from thin margins of lamplight always suggesting some other plot in some other bedroom, tensions to splay us soon enough. And then it occurred to you, or maybe it occurred to me, doesn’t matter, I think actually someone called and said that anyone who doesn’t leave something for you isn’t worth having, so maybe now's a good time to find a dapper little high school where everyone can be a little less civil, and blessed with selfishness, we could part the fingers interlocked between us, make fists and get busy. Then intensity fermented into green books of music, loud country music, and I love country music. It rolled around my ears in corridors where boredom had once been so irrefutable and heavy, and I was happy and dancing and throwing punches at pigeons and even hitting a few. But the romantic arc never made it over the willful lack of conviction, some gap between the faces on the heads we saw pass our table in the sour-faced restaurant run by those French people, okay a gap between that and the face in the dream you had of your father, the one where you said he stuffed a billy club down a duck’s throat and called for another shot of Dewar’s. I expected you to take things when you left, but not those things. Light diffuses evenly across the kitchen, blood through my body, and it’s sort of funny, but our whole thing fits between two haircuts, like a roadtrip or something. I feel now that I’ve been digested by time, and light would pool into terrible reflections of my own back as I backed into a mirror or performed some other forgetful jujitsu, an effort to lose thoughts or patterns of thought, but the light diffuses and you walk through it, collide with little pieces of what ate you, get angry and write long letters about how your hand can’t talk, how the paper is so light and effortless when you hold it how could you even know, you couldn’t even imagine holding this light and ridiculous thing that my hand brushed over in patterns it will later try to forget. Then I taped my mouth shut and tried to whistle. Leave me alone. Don’t call. Get lost, dumpster of confusion. I know it’s never been that easy, that from the eyes in your skull the black plastic bags were suffocating the trees even though to me it was more like a ballerina’s shadow had escaped and was dancing through the branches frantically with desperate happiness and cause for alarm. I guess either way something unsafe and ridiculous was happening, and I guess we knew it, I think we even talked about it, but I’ve been a little lonely since I started writing my dissertation. It’s about class consciousness among people who work behind registers. And it’s interesting, there’s all kinds of different races and classes and income levels represented in the world of cashiers, but at the level of values we see predominantly two classes, the complacent and the entitled, though many cashiers are some measure of both. The complacent are resigned to what they understand to be their position. They’re courteous and reliable; class issues only arise when people are rude to them, which they tend to handle fine, though if they say anything about it afterwards, it tends to be a cruel and brief dismissal not only of the occurrence, but of the entire offending person. The entitled have a very complicated expression of social hierarchy. Because they see themselves in transition, usually ascending, there’s this idea that their values won’t, or can’t, find full expression from their current position and so they don’t feel compelled to act in a way consistent with their values, while at the same time they may expect to be treated in accordance with those values. When people are rude to them, they flip out. Basically today’s been pasted together from the leavings of some green intensity and cigarettes crowded at the back of the passive classrooms of the skull. Will there be coffee on the other side? Will there be ladies to walk up to you on a plain old shit-for-brains day and ask you of Washington Square Park, “Why is this on the map?” I like it when people cock their heads a little when you talk. Seems elegant. I tell them I’m not sure, but Henry James wrote something complicated about it. Then these nice ladies with a telling lack of accent move along into non-history and the bulk of our hours waiting without a mind for restitution. I would surrender our moist telephone calls and arthritic tribes of entitlement if I knew who to give them up to. I never go anywhere or do anything slow because revision is only a function of doubt. Well okay, maybe doubt and shame. Actually, it’s just shame. Revision is a function of shame. But enough of these dead people, we must rise like blood in April! Instead here I am peeling seconds off the end of my life, glass of water, frown on face, notebook open to the parade of minutes and obvious as a daisycutter in the desert. No more nights in the kitchen or bowls of macaroni, no more misdemeanors with the microwave or blue orbs whistling into my ear, no more cats meowing at the television, no cigarettes on the patio, no more blessings in drag. My schedule is totally blank this afternoon.

I love to do my homework, It makes me feel so good. I love to do exactly As my teacher says I should. I love to do my homework, I never miss a day. I even love the men in white Who are taking me away.

I love your lips when they’re wet with wine And red with a wild desire; I love your eyes when the lovelight lies Lit with a passionate fire. I love your arms when the warm white flesh Touches mine in a fond embrace; I love your hair when the strands enmesh Your kisses against my face. Not for me the cold, calm kiss Of a virgin’s bloodless love; Not for me the saint’s white bliss, Nor the heart of a spotless dove. But give me the love that so freely gives And laughs at the whole world’s blame, With your body so young and warm in my arms, It sets my poor heart aflame. So kiss me sweet with your warm wet mouth, Still fragrant with ruby wine, And say with a fervor born of the South That your body and soul are mine. Clasp me close in your warm young arms, While the pale stars shine above, And we’ll live our whole young lives away In the joys of a living love.

Even your odds and ends. I love your teeth, crazy bones, Madcap knees and elbows. Forearm and backhand Hair makes you animal. Rare among things. The small of your back could pool rain Into water a main might drink. Perfect, From the whirlpools your fingers print On everything you touch To the moons on the nails of all ten toes Rising and setting inside your shoes Wherever you go.