if you want to be a poet
write about what you know.
it will be truthful and it will be soulful
and you will have taught your fingers how to dance
and believe me when I say
that will piss the critics right off.
go, go
go if you will.
I can read your mind.
I shall stay here with the clouds
and the sleeping cables
as a ghost on the wires.
I will mask the gouged wounds
of your absence
in metaphor,
smile blandly when asked about you.
I don’t care.
I don’t care.
I sit where I am
watching gouts of time disappear into nothing.
Where you were.
Where she was.
Inconsequential and erased.
Just a digital phantom, waiting for
decommissioning.
stars. stars.
everywhere I go,
I see lilies.
fear. I am frozen.
there are some days
where you just wish
you weren’t alive.
I still see those lilies,
nodding in vespertine light.
stamen, pistil, a single seed.
madness, wandering
they are all dead by the time we wake up.
I have seen you all in green
with your eyes glinting tawny
and I have seen you lying
embraced by lilies
awaiting me like a star
immolating fear.
fearless and ready
going to jump in to it all
leave the body, fly
the will to exist. the will
that others, too, will exist.
we will flicker through
identities just like
cards or clothes or time.
choose which is right for what time
and what place, and live, alive
upper layer and
lower layer. the trick is
one is everything
the other just feels like it’s
everything. but oh, empty!
we are cable-free
and ready to dive into
Real 2.0
everyone is connected.
unless you choose not to be.
she’s sure and terrified that North Korea
is going to blow everyone off the map
two suns falling below the horizon
they might, and when they do
she’ll be the one folding flags
making mysteries
and keeping all her secrets
because nothing hurts more than laughter
not even a mouthful of dust
falling out
I want a better
world, where beautiful people
will not ever die
where we will not
get bored, where there is no rot
of time: stagnation
where forever will
make us happy, happier than
change could ever do
they said I was meant to be
adaptable. they were wrong.
September, for me, is Spring
a southern hemispheric creature
back to front
lying to the mirror
diving into cyclones, not hurricanes
that spin the wrong way
that September the empire of another woman lay
broken and long-deserted at my feet.
I had no idea who she was, but,
she wasn’t me.
I did not understand.
I was not a broken creature.
I saw you sing, saw you raise one elegant eyebrow,
saw childhood fears turn to thrills and
September was pressing, not gently,
on the door of Spring.
enough of Winter, enough of that.
enough of all Winter, northern and southern and all its silence,
Tokyo to London to Boston
enough of it all.
the next September
I tried to throw myself in front of oncoming traffic
but I remembered you singing
sat with my back to a paperbark tree
and cried until I forgot my name instead.
