What if, when you die, you get stuck
in one of your old dreams?
Like the knotty one where you
keep telling me, “There’s so much
I’m not telling you”?
I’m thinking of us at City Hall,
combined,
dancing—
With four sinister feet . . .
The best citizens lined up in a parade
to gawk, and grin, and hear
me
serenade you.
Hear me
say a prayer:
God, excuse
their grins.
Me, in black; you, in off-white.
We don’t want to show off
anything too bright.
Anything enters Everything, spits out
Nothing to do with your empty-ball fantasy.
Mine’s of the past: If only an ear had fallen
off during the third act
of fucking
hacking
heckling the entire art form,
we’d both be better off. You,
in touch with cold reality. Me,
not wasting my warm breath.
They’ll all consider us hot-lucky—
you and me, the type to go out
from the town, plucking peaches,
picking cherries, choosing—
The eyes from mimes, while
they’re love-faking, taking
the time of their cheery lives.
I’ll work, run errands, sing
sweet nothings till the day
you lie back and conceive . . .
You’ve got to be kidding me; I’m
crying: Douse the damned muse!
Put her on the fucking pyre,
for making me sick.
We’ll forever stick together, never argue,
grow old and gray, ever closer . . .
The words that I say and have said, however
I’ve said them, may as well be glass-eyed dead.
Clark, here—he clearly can’t hear—
is a perfect specimen of that special man
who, when speaking to his once and would-be
lover is speaking only to himself, debating
negation. I have a dream . . .
Indulge me . . . just one last time.
Yet another origin of a boy
without a mind, only a brain made up
of an orgy of gray worms, words that matter
less than the body decomposing at my feet.
He’d never listen nor let me go, so
I stuck the stem into his dreamy eyes,
and rose from the occasion. He can’t exist;
but he still insists on wishing us together.