Which mask are you?

I left this morning saying ‘I love you’
as if setting out for some unknown country
instead of the corner shop. I wanted
you to be sure, in case
this time - out of, say, 10,000 departures
I never made it back: although
after 50 years together, 2 countries,
3 children, and several former journeys
that would put this one to shame
you’d think there’d be no need to pause
on my own doorstep, suddenly afraid
of the distance between us, of your absolute beauty,
of the growing aloneness when I clicked the latch.

These moves we make
To do and un-
Do each other
Must be lovely
From a distance.

Such a music,
Such a twilight,
A surfacing,
A sense of style.
No end to it.

The white hotels
We check into
Keep standing. They
Survive each blond
Who comes and goes.

Cities go on.
The lights go on
In cities. Cars
Go to the sea.
The sea goes on.

What’s left of us
Lasts in what is
Least us: in cars,
In the twilight
Of white cities,

In our houses,
In our closets—
Clothes we put on
In the hope of
Taking them off.

I want to know how it will end.
I want to be sure of what it will cost.
I want to strangle the stars for all they promised me.
I want you to call me on your drug phone.
I want to keep you alive so there is always the possibility of murder later.
I want to be there when you learn the cost of desire.
I want you to understand that my malevolence is just a way to win.
I want the name of the ruiner.
I want matches in case I have to suddenly burn.
I want you to know that being kind is overrated.
I want to measure how much torture we can stand.
I want to know where your altruism went.
I want to watch you lose control.
I want to watch you lose.
I want to know exactly what it’s going to take.
I want to see you insert yourself into glory.
I want your touches to scar me so I’ll know where you’ve been.
I want you to watch when I go down in flames.
I want to crush the thing you love just so you know I can.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name.
I want to work both sides of the fence.
I want to have two cats so when one dies one will eat the other
- and nothing will be wasted.
I want to reach my hand into the dark and feel what reaches back.
I want you to turn tender when you have the time.
I want to remember when my nightmares were clearer.
I want to be there when your hot black rage rips wide open.
I want to find a way for you to survive all this.
I want to taste my own kind.
I want America to be socialized around creation instead of fear.
I want to meet your host virus.
I want to charm your sleep captain.
I want everyone to see the tiara break.
I want to be wrapped in cold wet sheets to see if it’s different on this side.
I want you to play it to me over the phone.
I want you to make a scorching debut.
I want you to come on strong.
I want the television left on so I can sleep.
I want to crunch the numbers.
I want you to write your life story and leave me out of it.
I want to write my secret across your sky.
I want to keep you in the dark.
I want to leave you out in the cold.
I want to voice my concerns.
I want the exact same thing but different.
I want some soft drugs, some soft soft drugs.
I want to throw you.
I want to know if I’ll ever be safe in the dark.
I want to decide who next year’s dead rock stars will be.
I want you to know I know.
I want to speak hot metal fluently.
I want to know why you’re starting to look like the last one.
I want just enough rope to hang you.
I want to hurt myself before you do, because I can do it better.
I want to coax the keys from your hand.
I want to throttle the bottle blonde because I know what she did.
I want to know if you read me.
I want to swing with my eyes shut and see what I hit.
I want to silver your hands.
I want to know just how much you hate me so I can predict what you’ll do.
I want you to know the wounds are self-inflicted.
I want a controlling interest.
I want to be somewhere beautiful when I die.
I want to be your secret hater.
I want to stop destroying you but I can’t.
I want and I want and I want and I will always be hungry.

Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home.
~ Wislawa Szymborska

In the Kashmir Mountains,
my brother shot many men,
blew skulls from brown skins,
dyed white desert sand crimson.

What is there to say to a man
who has traversed such a world,
whose hands and eyes have
betrayed him?

Were there flowers there? I asked.

This is what he told me:

In a village, many men
wrapped a woman in a sheet.
She didn’t struggle.
Her bare feet dragged in the dirt.

They laid her in the road
and stoned her.

The first man was her father.
He threw two stones in a row.
Her brother had filled his pockets
with stones on the way there.

The crowd was a hive
of disturbed bees. The volley
of stones against her body
drowned out her moans.

Blood burst through the sheet
like a patch of violets,
a hundred roses in bloom.

there is a place in the heart that
will never be filled
a space

and even during the
best moments
and
the greatest
times

we will know it
we will know it
more than
ever

there is a place in the heart that
will never be filled

and
we will wait
and
wait

in that
space.

we like to shower afterwards
(I like the water hotter than she)
and her face is always soft and peaceful
and she’ll watch me first
spread the soap over my balls
lift the balls
squeeze them,
then wash the cock:
“hey, this thing is still hard!”
then get all the hair down there,-
the belly, the back, the neck, the legs,
I grin grin grin,
and then I wash her…
first the cunt, I
stand behind her, my cock in the cheeks of her ass
I gently soap up the cunt hairs,
wash there with a soothing motion,
I linger perhaps longer than necessary,
then I get the backs of the legs, the ass,
the back, the neck, I turn her, kiss her,
soap up the breasts, get them and the belly, the neck,
the fronts of the legs, the ankles, the feet,
and then the cunt, once more, for luck…
another kiss, and she gets out first,
toweling, sometimes singing while I stay in
turn the water on hotter
feeling the good times of love’s miracle
I then get out…
it is usually mid-afternoon and quiet,
and getting dressed we talk about what else
there might be to do,
but being together solves most of it
for as long as those things stay solved
in the history of women and
man, it’s different for each-
for me, it’s splendid enough to remember
past the memories of pain and defeat and unhappiness:
when you take it away
do it slowly and easily
make it as if I were dying in my sleep instead of in
my life, amen.

Van Gogh writing his brother for paints
Hemingway testing his shotgun
Celine going broke as a doctor of medicine
the impossibility of being human
Villion expelled from Paris for being a thief
Faulkner drunk in the gutters of his town
the impossibility of being human
Burroughs killing his wife with a gun
Mailer stabbing his
the impossibility of being human
Maupassant going mad in a row boat
Dostoevsky lined up against a wall to be shot
Crane off the back of a boat into the propeller
the impossibility
Sylvia with her head in the oven like a baked potato
Harry Crosby leaping into that Black Sun
Lorca murdered in the road by the Spanish troops
the impossibility
Artaud sitting on the madhouse bench
Chatterton drinking rat poison
Shakespeare a plagiarist
Beethoven with a horn stuck into his head against deafness
the impossibility the impossibility
Nietzsche gone totally mad
the impossibility of being human
all too human
this breathing
in and out
out and in
these punks
these cowards
these champions
these mad dogs of glory
moving this little bit of light toward
us
impossibly.

225 days under grass
and you know more than I.
they have long taken your blood,
you are a dry stick in a basket.
is this how it works?
in this room
the hours of love
still make shadows.

when you left
you took almost
everything.
I kneel in the nights
before tigers
that will not let me be.

what you were
will not happen again.
the tigers have found me
and I do not care.