Sonnets Called "On the Sacredness"

Close by the jerkwater rancheros tonight, the round gloom longs, a window in the gloom, an attitude in the window, a pleading in the attitude, an unwitnessed ravishment in the pleading. A man stands there in the window thinking about how naked the water looks, thinking the water looks like emptiness, it looks like nothing. His heart aches to think how many gamblers have broke down on this highway? How many princesses of ice? I know I'm suburban, I've got a shitty whiskey in my hand, I work a job like eating a knife . . . Everyone's sperm all over my life, the sad waiting. Here's to the simple and endless desperate person lifting this glass. •  •  • If you imagine you're at the base of a cross coming out of your chest, that its vertical beam is a café and its crossbeam a bar of inebriates running along the rear of the café, that you're in a soft booth in the vertical beam of the cross facing a blonde over whose shoulder you happen to glance at the instant the TV above the bar broadcasts the unmistakable image of fate, the Vietnamese man getting a bullet shot into his ear, then you understand that I had to stop eating my squid stew. I started to cry. Susan tried to make some gesture, baby playing in front of the cobra's den, and it was enough: I was lodged in the moment, we were the treasure. •  •  • Sweet heat each breath of air, sugar of fire, and yet Dark said she was my date. She told me Don't be late. I guess it is our fate here in the mental hospital of passion and forgetting to scream inside the dream, put back the suicide, stand upon the corner starkly lit by the beam of memory from the face of a friend amid the glass of a toast, and wait that wait. •  •  • But I always come back to the corner of feelings and the sponge of vinegar. What is made with the hands rises up to seize us and press every word to its service so that I can never look at anything that hasn't been talked about a thousand times already, but I saw him screw his face up like a child in suspense of some mischief, and they blew his brains out. Your homework is more important than Cub Scouts. His head jerks. There's a blue-and-white menu by Susan's left hand. He collapses as if full of sand. You'd better settle down and eat. At the next table before his mother the boy in the Cub Scout uniform settles down and eats.