Horror.

It is in the margins that it happens,

This life.

With the sweat of my brow

I hoist high the sun,

And at night, as with a sigh, let it fall.

All the world is mine.

I am all the world. In me,

It writhes with joy and sickness.

When I feel it there, I want

To cut it out.

I feel like a terrible microphone

Buzzing and ticking and howling

All the voices I keep inside.

The world looks at itself in me.

It bares its teeth, its long, awful teeth

That sink a century deep.

It is a terror. It forgets

I am only human. 

The Joy of a Sorrowful Life.

Let it be the end of all that,

the drapes drawn in on windows,

to keep our silent deaths from smiling

out into the bright, unsullied world.

Every word comes drawing

its own conclusions. The heart shuttering,

the sail at half mast, the hopeful wind,

and its lonesome urging hands.

A thousand tiny details to make a life

but a margin larger. The tiny bird

that batters its cage, and makes with its wings

a terrible storm.  

Making Loves.

Because their mouths are like poems,

All full of grace

And syllabic symmetry,

I wanted to kiss them all.

They were all so beautiful,

in their bedraggled way.

So clean, unaffected.

I wanted to make more of them,

Make them gods.

And so I did, and in reverence bowed

Down, and away.

The silent supplicator

Before each colossus.

Briefly, each stooped to touch my hand.

I had made them, these men,

These boys, into beasts,

Into monsters of memory.

I fed each one from

My own breast.

They loved me, briefly.

And I loved them.  

Vows.

Oh, it was everything.
The father that could not love you
From all those phone calls away.
The mother that broke herself
on the prow of your childhood.

Is it better, this silent wondering?
The mother that broke herself against you,
The men who walked away.
The body becomes a museum of achings.

I am growing older. I feel I am
In frank discussion with myself, sitting
Down at last, prepared to lay everything straight,
settle my own accounts.

Child, it’s alright, I want to say.
Don’t take the blade to your heart.
You knew better, but sometimes truth is like a vow.
It must be renewed again and again.