A.
I perceive one picking me out by secret and divine signs,
Acknowledging none else, not parent, wife, husband, brother, child, any nearer than I am, Some are baffled, but that one is not that one knows me.
Ah lover and perfect equal.
I meant that you should discover me so by faint indirections, And I when I meet you mean to discover you by the like in you.
B.
— In every every area I consider important you have my support.
— In some place deep inside of you you still think I’m sick. Isn’t that right? Okay. Define it for me. What do you mean by “sick”? Sick unhealthy? Sick perverted? Sick, I’ll get over it? Sick to be locked up?
— I think you’ve adjusted to life quite well.
— All things considered. In the only area I consider important I don’t have your support at all. The single-minded determination of all you people to forever see us as sick helps keeps us sick.
— I saw how unhappy you were!
— So were you! You wound up going to shrinks, too. We grew up side by side. We both felt pretty much the same about Mom and Pop. I refuse to accept for one more second that I was damaged by our childhood while you were not.
C.
Wait. It gets worse. The hospital doctors refused to examine him to put a cause of death on the death certificate, and without a death certificate the undertakers wouldn’t take him away, and neither would the police. Finally, some orderly comes in and stuffs Albert in a heavy-duty GLAD bag and motions us with his finger to follow and he puts him out in the back alley with the garbage. He says, “Hey, man. See what a big favor I’ve done for you, I got him out, I want fifty bucks.”
D.
Lets make fierce love on the overstuffed, hand-me-down sofa. We can burn it up, too. Our hungers
will evaporate like money.
E.
Come,
as once when you heard my far- off cry and, listened, stepped
from your father’s house to your gold car, to yoke the pair whose beautiful thick-feathered wings oaring down mid-air from heaven carried you to light swiftly
on dark earth; then, blissful one, smiling your immortal smile
you asked, What ailed me now that made me call you again? What was it that my distracted
heart most wanted?
F.
–We can’t send them out.
— We have to if we want anybody to come to the dance. They were late from the printers as it is.
— We can go through and scratch out the word with a Magic Marker.
— Ten thousand times? Look, I feel sympathy for young guys still living at home on Long Island with their parents, but most men getting these…Look at you, in your case what difference does it make? You live alone, you own your own apartment, your mother lives in another state…
— What about my mailman?
G.
on the tips of her breasts on her navel and my breath howling into her entrances through lungs of pain.
Greedy as herring-gulls
or a child
I swing out over the earth over and over again.
H.
I am so sick of statistics, and numbers, and body counts, …; and every day, there are more numbers, and fights — I am so sick of fighting, and bragging about fighting and everybody’s stupidity, and blindness, and intransigence, and guilt trips. You can’t eat the food? Don’t eat the food. Take your poison. I don’t care. You can’t get off the floor — fine, stay there. I don’t care. Fish — fish is good for you; we don’t want any of that, do we? (Item by item, he throws the food on the floor). No green salad. No broccoli; we don’t want any of that, no, sir. No bread with seven grains. Who would ever want milk? You might get some calcium in your bones. (The carton of mild explores when it hits the floor).