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Editor's
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Living
as Writers
You once
said, living as
writers, we’d know what the
other
was working on even through a
closed door. One quiet
for
poems; another tap, rhythmic tap, more tense,
this for
dialogue from the
Royal typewriters. The same
we
bought one another as gifts.
I told
you this was
naïve, that making up with verse
before
fucking would not be
romantic. It was a fool’s
notion.
Besides, I whispered,
as you were
leaving,
I
built that door, impregnable, like a fortress.
We
never lived as writers; not
together at least. Now when
I read your
verse, there is sadness – my own, shed like
skin for where you
are weak. You would have never
known
the real quiet of my verse; my dialogue, gone
unspoken.
Somewhere in this illusion, three clever lines
passed
on the threshold – sorry, celibate, sorry,
angry sorry.
Those which would have defined
us.
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The
Short History of Hatred
I’ve
watched his crow do this trick
all morning: diving to the
median, playing with food
there, stashing away all these
newspapers.
Some have heard him talking in
extraordinary madness.
His crow will spread the
ashes of ancestors
in shit while he circles the mausoleum.
With sacred grip he has taunted; made lines of
merciless
verse; left an orphaned litter of broken
covenants.
This legacy is simple echo of
wing
flaps, flailing in the spare heat without resolution.
There
is a man beside a Model A; he wants to
shoot his crow.
This man is an old man, tired man,
folding over old tabloid
editions to carry onto the street like a more
simple form of
the gospel.
Some have heard they are kin; he covets
a murder,
because they are joined as parts of gray and
February are: indissoluble.
Regardless, he too will shit,
taunt, exist without
mirth, break whatever promises:
he
will not speak of love, fucking
love – not a word,
though he too is locked in its very chamber.
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Saddest
Woman in the Room
Her
mouth, bird’s nest; arms and legs, these also
only
composite tangles of found twigs and line.
Hands are
bird’s nests too – like her mouth,
unable to
construct simple models of biography.
She was the
saddest woman in the room – blue in possession
of her,
this sadness, an atrophy which sets in the eye.
No one there
could mistake her stare
for anything except the expression of
dumb hunger:
for replacement limbs, pangs for
those
unbound.
A new mouth to speak of it – her woe, and
hands,
those only to confirm its absolute depth.
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