THE MIRROR OF SIMPLE SOULS
I do not like old water.
The water in the ocean is old
The lake is old
But maybe it’s not
Subject to the logic of time, of old and new.
Water.
When we sat on a slab of flat rock
I was repulsed
Until I felt you
Behind the museum.
When I was lost in water I understood
But I won’t tell you.
I looked at the round mirror
Affixed to the tree.
The round mirror
Affixed to the tree
Reminded me
Of The Mirror of Simple Souls
Which I had read for class
Earlier that year.
The Mirror of Simple Souls
Is about
The seven stages of annihilation
The Soul goes through
On its path to Oneness
With God through Love.
The title The Mirror of Simple Souls implies
That a book is a mirror.
It cures the soul of its complication
By manipulating its reflection
Or revealing it.
A book, like a mirror
Is held to the face.
Complication or simplicity lies
On the surface, in the face.
If language is sullied
Through use, is this use?
Each moment of wakefulness
Is followed by delusion.
To suffer means
To be acted upon.
When I think of you
I want to make a picture of you
So I can keep you.
A glass of milk with ice
The elegant cross
Of your arms
In a sleeveless top.
The hair is love; it bothers the face.
NOTES ON ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA
Medea was a pharmakon
O My oblivion
Later You will really lose
Antony So tough
He drank horse piss
The secret Use everything
Address someone Who is not
History Deep gossip
Absence All is horizon
It is unskillful to eat
Your tool
Rome Happens
When you really start
Falling apart
In aught August
A strange narcotic Next
How do we surrender
Youth Or try not to surrender it
Intrinsicate knot
A neologism for love Not war
Begins with nay
Supersaturation Rips you apart nightly
To create The night
Isis and Osiris
As water is in water
Women’s secrets Darkening
I saw the back
Of a black hole
Living here Shattered
By the horizon effect
Ultra chartreuse Venus
That youth
It was pissed out of us
In the spring water
An ancestral urge
To taste for poison
Time is out of joint
Dripping slowly toward Christ
You go there There is talk
You go there and you talk
And that’s history Doubt
The wounded chance To think in public
Body is gossip
Hidden In nets
Its shadow A defect
This language ravishes
Turn the ship around I will follow you
The I Where the nay was
The worm will Go through
The guts
Of the beggar-king
A crooked elegy
Digested We will give up everything
To experience each other
At the severest limits of Our lives
Out of time
In Judas’s unnaturalness
And villainy
The messenger
The real messenger
Form A lengthy suicide
Effacing the whole
Dream
REALITY MATH
There’s no beginning of the end of horror.
I want love from this petroculture
Apocrypha and you, uncut
In a sweater wet with silver
Telling them nothing.
In the inner life of history
It’s space that is profane, not Earth.
Each word is a bribe, literal and hieroglyphic.
Objects become dangerous.
No, they show their danger
When the sun goes completely, completely down
I want to see many pictures.
I wonder what my life will be like.
POEM WRITTEN SIX MONTHS AFTER READING LEAR
The cause of history
A basic irrationality
Surrounded by lives.
The past, a dictator, says love.
A collective orgasm
In the presence of reality.
The drum kicks in sadly
At the joke.
I don’t want to be in the ground.
I want to be in the world
And to protect myself from it.
Oh, this is a rigid art
That sings inward
Like the shame-flower
In domesticated green.
Will it all be destroyed?
Definitely
I will hear it on my radio
In the twenty-second century.
It will be like a snow globe inside me
Life, barbaric
And delicate, lyric.
POEM FOR AN EQUINOX
I dip my dirty hand
Into a new tub of lotion.
A loss of faith seems the only way forward
Earth is more than surface
We’ve barely touched it
The past
And it goes away constantly.
Squeeze the foam
Like a wildcard
A blue joker
Out of me.
It’s oral
And anarchic
Nothing but hell.
I want a baby
Milky vetiver
There are signs on the mountains
And death loves
Desertion.
No, survival does
And survival looks like death
But it isn’t.
When you die
Another you
Appears immediately
And that’s annihilation.
POEM WRITTEN IN WINTER WITH A LINE FROM MECHTHILD VON MAGDEBURG
God said
I couldn’t help but be God.
The romance between the maid
And the Lord.
The androgynous prelapsarian body.
Resurrection, because the world
Thinks of us.
Second life, because it sees us.
Let the mind recognize itself
In the kitchen.
It will ask for nothing
Like sleep. Only a trace of it
Will remain in the body.
Who made this book?
I made it, with my powerlessness.
To live, lie down in snow.
Love is beautiful. It can be abused.
WHAT THE MIND WANTS
Origin is the goal.
To want to be denied it
And worse, to be denied it.
It’s almost the end of disaster.
I miss my disaster.
Sending me down on the dumbwaiter
Touching all the elevator buttons
In tight kidskin gloves.
In the doorway you say,
What do you have to say for yourself?
In a theater of the whatever
Life is not about happiness.