NOT AS HELL AS YOU

It was a whole
Day had passed and I
Said so

Many things that might have been
True that my lips
Were chapped, my fingertips

Calloused and white, this evening a song
Says you better come on
In my kitchen and I feel doomed

To absorb disquiet, tiny
Trimmed hairs from my mustache sticking
To the damp bathroom wall, a friend

Calls to tell me he slept
With his boss, another broke
Her leg biking along

The Everglades, when I say I
Refuse I mean trash
As in I trash the idea of a voluptuous

Remoteness and I trash the tyrannical zest
With which our minds injure
And betray us, if consciousness is

A train they’ve uncoupled
The sleeping cars and supposing truth
Is a woman she is

Like Marilyn, stripped
Of all but the most conditional
Meanings, I wish to crowd

This believing, to imperceptibly shift
The spotlights until each
Angle has been teased bare before

The libidinous mob, the man
Under the psychic’s eave is rather
Pacific today, his ear

Crushed against a book-sized radio, no drunks
To taunt him into rage, I fear
I may have misguessed the wallaby’s

Sex having spied it
Grooming a pouch yesterday
As wailing toddlers rode

The carousel for free, I want you
To take me not
As I am, but as I intend

For you to become, this only
Works in poems, the song says I am
A young man that’s inclined

To seek pleasure and I sneeze
On the already grimy
Keys, only the most used letters

Free of it, my love finally
Sleeps, a book of clinical neurology
On her breast rising

And falling like an overturned
Raft, we are determined to sneak
Into a movie, I simply

Have to replace the strings
On my guitar, have to explain the use
Of beliefs bound

To change for a perfect user
Of words uses things and I am so far
From doing either

Subliminally rapt by my
Intoxication for all things bent
On sincerity, on

The hinge that separates a concern for objects
On the lens from the impulse
That traverses an axon and I know

Its silly to think care
Could exist in any sense unsullied
But I also know that it’s bound

To be raining outdoors.