I had told you what it means to miss someone,

That I can't wish that things weren't as they are.

And I hadn't thought of what it would be like

To see a photo of you swimming in the ocean.

I want to say, there, that's it, that feeling

Of being overwhelmed, of the expansiveness

of being hit in the stomach, being overcome with desire,

Not to touch, not to taste, not to feel,

But to be all of them, to give in completely, let yourself go.

A friend of mine who often questions, I think, whether we are,

Did one of the bravest things I'm not sure I could have done,

And reminded a professor to keep his word.

And I wonder if she thinks that the outrage she felt

Must somehow outweigh the bravery?

Kant was wrong; the greatest things are often done from the strongest feelings,

And the worst things done with the development of a peaceful inner world.

Of a quiet murmuring that lulls you to sleep.

And these are the things I want to tell you.

I want to whisper things in your ear

Not to seduce or feed desire, but just to have you that close,

Close enough that that I can wonder if now, for a second,

My breath would be still on your skin

The way you were still for a second in the tension of the photograph

Whether it will hold my thoughts

The way for a second the sea held you.

Meditation on Dream-Logic

I dreamed last night that one of my coworkers, the sort of only friend/not/friend I have it seems, was a hermaphrodite. And I know this because I had to pull thorns out of her foot with my teeth, and they were sharp, and I tasted my blood, and I knew: And I knew in the way that you always don't know. I believe in the negative logic, that things can only not match precisely and can never exactly overlap in positivity.

Because the irony of the dream vision is what I can't put in to words, I can say:

It wasn't about sex.

Or money,

Or sex,

or power,

or sex,

and what it was most nearly not about

was that we all don't see each other naked

and even here I am clothing myself

By saying what it was not,

And that I'm glad I was able to help a friend

If only in a dream.

Obscenities: A Triptych

I.

I sit alone to read tonight.

And you should know:

I am not naked,

Drunk,

And fucking

With the spaces on a blank page

And with reality

In the ways that it fucks with me.

II. MY story is not so hard to write:

It only consists of the insistent starlings

Outside my window at 6 am

And does not end until I write how much I love you

On my pillow in tears.

(I know how little it means

for me to declare my love: and so

I don't

(-- it is a matter of choice,

here, I'll have you NB) (III))

Breaking Up: A Soliloquy for Two Voices

If I told you that boredom was a girl I like to fuck,

You might think that I was lying

When I told you that I masturbate three times a day.

The problem with the death of God

Is that He, if not my roommate, would understand

What happened on his bed.

I'd like to know someone who understood

That the longest closest lover that I had

Was a man who would not call more than once a month.

In the fifteen years I had at home

Silence crept in to my heart.

It broke around the edges and made me.

The "fascinating mind" you tell me that I have

Is from the interaction with the world

That silence creates.

The plants that you gave me for my birthday

Are in my office and dying

Obscenely.

I could have been a poet.

But I had the choice to go mad, and instead cut my wrists

And the voices from the radiator were offended.

And now I only hear them when I go to bed sober and alone.

Going to confession

"To those who have been far away from the sacrament of Reconciliation and forgiving love I make this appeal: come back to this source of grace; do not be afraid! Christ himself is waiting for you. He will heal you, and you will be at peace with God!” (Homily of Pope John Paul II on September 13, 1987 at Westover Hills, San Antonio, Texas.)

I.

I am writing from a lack but not to regain it.

A lack of the self, of an other from which to privatize myself

Of fences, and barriers, of the bushes that grow around the yard

Where I privately get drunk and beat children.

I have exposed myself to the neighbors in the most egregious way

Only to find that the houses across the street are empty and have been

Long enough that their structures are condemned and dust

Leaks from breaking rafters.

Understood in this way, contrition is therefore, the beginning and the heart of conversion, of that evangelical metánoia which brings the person back to God like the Prodigal Son returning to his father, and which has in the sacrament of Penance its visible sign and which perfects attrition.” (John Paul II, Apostolic Exhortation Reconciliatio et Pænitentia, n. 31. 1983.)

II.

I am writing in the way I stayed up until two editing

and drinking warming flat beer.

I am writing because I am a triptych, depending on your view

Of where I begin,

I do not have a sex life. I am one, though, in a nonconfessional abrasive way

The best thing I can do (and my most loving act) is to cut the inside of my lips with razors

And smile,

Not to show the pain in the smile

But because smiling erases the pain and shows the blood that tastes like

musk or semen, a coppery acid that has less the acerbic mushrooming smell of them

and carries new life the same way.

O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended you and I detest all my sins, because I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell; but most of all because they offend you, my God, who are all good and deserving of all my love. I firmly resolve with the help of your grace, to confess my sins, to do penance, and to amend my life. Amen.

You may now go to Confession.

III.

This poem should not be disturbing, really, it is not auto, not biography, but more

Auto than biography,

A sense that it has lacked its writer

That it is its writer,

That I who am typing feel disconnected with its form

And that is the closest you will get to my private vision of myself

A rude confession to highlight the underarching accomplishment of

confession, of never catching it except by drawing a line where we are all greek, all roman, all jew and gentile.

The one Pauline ethic is that we never get it right.

A Failed Sonnet

continuation

And yet less than a breath of a sigh implying you want me would be

more than it needs to

for I already

seem to

rush to

you.

Imaging you asking me to love you

Has taken more of my time than it should;

Envision the common grackle, and note the way that even in your mind

You see the blue-black of the sheen on the head

And want it to be a black bird though it is not.

I am blessed to know my confession will be misunderstood.

Third Layer

Kenneth, who had the sort of looseness that let hims say "basil"

As if he were squeezing the "l" by straining it through the not-z "s" and

Encompassing it all with an "i" pronounced "e,"

is taller than life, and lanky, and says

that he would have me be as honest as he can

within the confines of this,

Asks me why I dream the way I do

And wake up not knowing who I am and knowing I am alone,

And I wonder what he's doing in the dream with the girl who grabs my ass

And kisses me hard upon the lips and shifts so that her face is never quite real

and barely though decisively in color,

and they are though the same person

hidden in the same sentence.

And at least one of them loves you in the most difficult way

and that is why you were the dream.

Response Paper 1 -- What Is Poetry?

This sentence has no meaning and is

In fact a vastly worse off thing

The longer that I draw it out

And keep myself from slipping out

Of meter though that may just be

Inside my head because it can't

Be so simple to define the way

In which this sentence has no start

And plays against my failing brain

To hit the circuits I have missed

Translating into ebbing flows

That catch the stocking cap I see

against the window pane

And God I love that boy's hair

The way it falls around his face

And I perform my gender but

I know that still I wonder if

He's got a tattoo on his hand where else the ink

may have spilled but

That is kept inside and so

This sentence has no meaning still.

A very short poem

The man who was on "Married... with Children"

Is now the patriarch on "Modern Family"

Good Friday was the day it all began

And imagine the horror of seeing your teacher fucked with nails.

Because that's the way it really is, al la Irigary: Some penetrative action,

The kind of sublime rim-job of the whip.
And it should be pornographic, too, because I'm crying as I write this

and hoping Dwarkin understands that the patriarchical fucker whom she hates

Is somehow at his best before he knows his fate

before the age of 30 in other words,

before he receives a call or performs a miracle (in an attempt the exegesis of my youth points out

to show his doubting mother what he'll do)

and turns the water into wine (probably grape juice we're told)

And I am found or unfound in exactly the same way that

Jesus was fucked to the cross with nails.

Written in found ideas:

I want something written in tags, eg scooters, vacation, fall, blank a space for me to create my own

Ideas for shortcuts: bold italics publish save draft

important ideas

"publish post" and "save now"

and different colors that I can't explain just at the moment except

that this wasn't supposed to be followed but that

I I'm supposed to Me, I'm supposed to "use emotion" when I talk supposed to

Tell other people how I feel

because otherwise,

(my shrink believes)

I'll wind up writing to myself for others half drunk on whiskey on

Good Friday

What I wrote for a collaborate project with the most talented poet I know

I was a freshman once, and that song struck me with more than the intensity it needed to, freshly broken up with a fiance whose life I thought I had destroyed with the self-aggrandizement that can only happen when you forget that you are you and things may be larger than that. I went outside tonight and saw that the wind had blown every light piece of garbage against the brick wall of the building I'm moving out of in a perfect symmetrical line of rustling white and wondered what it was that I should say or how I should categorize it and I forgot for a second that I think that connection is really false and that we're trapped and forgot how terrified I was to start writing over the new year and how the terror struck deep inside of of me and felt instead like I used to high on speed when I could go about everything and know I must be tired but it didn't matter but I had to hurry anyway.