How does one go
about dying?
Who on earth
is going to teach me—
The world is filled with people
who have never died
Deceptively easy to read, they are bruising when you slow down and read them aloud, and allow some breathing room to the spaces between lines and stanzas.
Alcohol
You do look a little ill.
But we can do something about that, now.
Can’t we.
The fact is you’re a shocking wreck.
Do you hear me.
You aren’t all alone.
And you could use some help today, packing in the
dark, boarding buses north, putting the seat back and
grinning with terror flowing over your legs through
your fingers and hair . . .
I was always waiting, always here.
Know anyone else who can say that.
My advice to you is think of her for what she is:
one more name cut in the scar of your tongue.
What was it you said, “To rather be harmed than
harm, is not abject.”
Please.
Can we be leaving now.
We like bus trips, remember. Together
we could watch these winter fields slip past, and
never care again,
think of it.
I don’t have to be anywhere.
Memoir
Just hope he forgot the address
and don’t answer the phone
for a week:
put out all the lights
in the house—
behave like you aren’t there
if some night when
it’s blizzarding, you see
Franz Wright arrive
on your street with his suitcase
of codeine pills,
lugging that heavy
black manuscript
of blank texts.
—from The Poem Said
The poem said never love anything
Not even you?
I asked
and it answered
especially me
Based On a Prayer of Rabi'a Al-Adawiyya
God, if I speak my love to you in fear of hell, incinerate me in it;
if I speak my love to you in hope of heaven, close it in my face.
But if I speak to you simply because you exist, cease
withholding from me your
neverending beauty.
Description of Her Eyes
Two teaspoonfuls,
and my mind goes
everyone can kiss my ass now --
then it's changed,
I change my mind.
Eyes so sad, and infinitely kind.
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