And if my life to this point falls apart ‘cos it’s not real
I learned from firm sand walls of my creation
how boundaries are
all for the lost.
Knee deep in ambrosia I yearned others could believe in
my private miracles, to peer heel-high like a girl for a
kiss
at the black-eyed susan glow beyond the bush,
to see the fireflies on the highway tonight, the universe
of
unseen raspberries, the clots of pond moss pull away the sluggish
green from the jungle’s weary summer of no sleep.
The bus to Utopia passes Parsons Street at each lapse
of the clock, while couples lope in white cloths and shoulderbags,
rarely talk, sing notes occasionally in Chinese keys
as time goes dripping by, July waiting for some word from
the coast,
the barest of frictious breezes, and I eat my sangfroid
sanguishes
wrecktified and rectitudinal before the all-seeing blind
eye
saying don’t
believe the hope, the righteous pettifoggery
all it ever does is
kill you the hard, slow, painful way
in pennyante
petitbourgeoisie-ary catching on your petticoat wad.
Nobody came when I locked myself in the closet, three
years old,
the darkness total, like the shame I felt in liking it, the rent of escape
others' need for me to become them (and, if not, stand in
judgment),
and when the neighbor girl let in the light, and I saw my
mother’s face
still absorbed in her dried flower reveries, I knew that
I’d felt guilty
for nothing, I’d been cheated like some orphan sold the
snake oil
of propriety toward the whole, that brand you’ll never
understand
but must let control you, your impulses, your instincts,
your desires,
the monolithic presence that does not even exist: the
world of others.
Barbarian sophisticates with fright wigs de rigeur
will sleep on blotter sheets with fishes. I only scrivened, I said,
the ledgers, I didn’t game the
deals,
but an antiquarian of greatness
is no less on his own
is no less on his own
than one who is without any other.
My blue harmonica home, still the heart stays sick;
I don’t want to be alone
any longer.