Recoveryfor Young John AllynAn old alchemist gave the following consolation to one of his disciples: No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown friends will come and seek you.―Carl JungMAYBE FOR FUGUES?I needed for myself to write this, and be unhindered by the prospect of their hearing it,But I am not sure I will publish it, if it right to, or if it really will help anyone;It takes something away from the beauty of the poems to explain them.November 25th, 2020, A Secret SuicideREASONS FOR AN EMPATH NOT TO KILL HERSELFI don’t know how to write this story without breaking down crying. I don’t really know how to tell it. When I see it in my memory it is like a movie I cannot allow myself to watch for more than a few minutes at a time. I guess the only way I can think about doing it is in third person, since when I write in first person I don’t know where to start, I don’t know how to structure it. But even when I try to begin in third person, I still don’t know where to begin, and the whole thing begins to seem false. I think the only way I can tell it is through my perspective now, looking back. I am not even sure I’ll be able to finish this, let alone get it anywhere close to as structurally sound as the rest of the novels I’ve written. As awful and cruel as some of the things I have written about have been. As terrible as some of my subject matter often is, I find myself now quite overwhelmed at the simple prospect of having to write something which is not fiction. I already feel terribly guilty and sad that I have not finished this novel sooner. At least written more of an honest version of what my life was like when I was 15. I’m embarrassed to think I’ve spent all this time avoiding writing the only story I ever cared about telling. But even with all my embarrassment, it is nothing compared to the sobbing I’m doing as I’m writing this. I’m not scared, I’m not angry, or afraid of anything anymore. I’m just so goddamn sad when I think all the shit that has happened to all of us. I feel so far away now from everything I went through, but I can barely get through this page without soaking my sleeves with snot. I don’t want to try and write this well. I don’t want to try and write this beautifully, I just want to tell you what happened, and the things that I learned that helped me stick around.Maybe I should start off by saying that it’s okay to die nothing bad’s going to happen, except the pain you feel as you go. I don’t know why I’m supposed to write this, but I know I am. No one’s going to blame you. People will miss you. They will lie about you at your funeral. They will say, “we loved her so much,” and that will be a lie. People who love you do not let you die. It is a simple fact that will forever be true. People who love you do not watch you wither into the crystal shadow of your youth, as you prepare for the next life. People who love you do not torture your heart and mind. People who love you do not scream at you while you are weeping in the shower when they know you are on the brink of suicide. People who love you do not try and convince you to stay in abusive relationships. People who love you are not manipulative, they are not vindictive. They do not gaslight you. They do not mindfuck you until all you want to do is kill yourself. People who love you do not need to be begged for a hug three times in a row after you have told them you have never been doing worse. People who love you do not forget to ask you how you are and talk about themselves and their day for 3 hours without asking you how was yours. People who love you are not afraid of you. They do not need to, after being told that you are suicidal, be sat down, and told calmly and kindly that it would be nice if they could ask you how you are doing, maybe just once a day would be nice. When you tell parents who love you that you are depressed, they do not tell you that they often think about suicide, and give you an example of how they might do it. Parents who love you do not romanticize you as a sorrowful reincarnation of their dead brother, and watch you lamentingly, as though your suicide would finally give them permission to kill themselves, and not be judged or blamed, or held to any account. People who love you acknowledge when one of your family members is mentally disturbed and abusive. People who love you do not tell you you are being dramatic when you are fighting for your safety, your health, and your life. People who love you admit when they’ve made mistakes, and then change their behavior. People who love you do not abandon you. People who love you do not tell you you are making things up, or acting out for know reason. Parents who love you do not share their emotions so frequently and transparently with you that you realize all too early they are human, worse they are like children in adult bodies, with adult responsibilities. Parents who love you don’t tell you they aren’t as strong as you. Parents who love you do not overshare about their marriage to the point where you have to tell them to get divorced because they’re too immature, irresponsible, and afraid to make the decision themselves. People who love you do not take advantage of you when you’re in pain. People who love you do not use your wounds as an opportunity to get pity for their own. Or it is true that people who love you may do all these things, but it is not that they do not love you, it is simply that they do not know how. People who know how to love you do not make you feel like you are the victim, or the persecutor, or the hero. People who know how to love you see all of you, without judgement. They see you as the ever-changing amorphous being that you are.THE BEGINNING OF RECOVERYAfter many years of severe depression, unacknowledged anxiety, and many months of severe isolation, I found myself in Campo Grande, Brazil, in 2018 stuck in a house an hour outside of Rio for two weeks straight, (a situation which oddly mirrored quarantine) waiting for one travel partner’s yellow fever to clear up, and for the other one, whose broken down car we were depending on to get around, to stop staying up all night with his brother doing cocaine so that he could drive—with a broken foot cause by barefoot skateboarding—his car to the shop. I spent most of my days in the back yard next to a rarely used playground, sitting under a coconut tree, drinking too much coffee and trying to write poems that wouldn’t end up being useless to everyone but me.I was suffering through a three year long delusional period of excessive emotional distrust and constant suspicion of authority leading to extreme secrecy, in which I had developed a paranoid social hyper-vigilance based on a history of psychological and emotional familial abuse and manipulation which began in the aftermath of my parent’s mutually impromptu separation—where one day when I was 14 my mother had shared too much of her marital problems with me and coming home crying I told my father they couldn’t stay together, and crying and thanking me, they agreed— my suspicion of the reliability authority was therefore not unfounded, but my obsessive and paranoid suspicion of people in general was something which I developed later. After the fruition of their separation, using my excessive curiosity in any emotional situation, I tried to prevent another event such as my parent’s failing marriage from hitting me by surprise. Please only fool me once.An attempt at hyper-vigilance, which mostly presents as dramatic and unfounded speculation for other people’s motives and emotional needs, was a coping mechanism which I relied on as a necessarily aggressive defense not only from having the rug pulled out from under me again, but also to attempt to protect myself from the severe and volatile behavior certain family members had developed in my father’s absence. I grew accustomed to continuous mental manipulation, gaslighting, what appears to have been an emotional form of Munchausen’s by proxy syndrome, wherein abuse was used as a method of seeking catharsis and intimacy from a child, wounding them in order to take care of them and feel fulfilled as well as use another’s apparent suffering to distract from their own, and finally an insidious empathetic familial tendency of hurting others as a form of self-torture.In order to maintain a relative level of sanity during my adolescence, I turned to writing, and was lucky enough to find a truly great teacher, a sturdily talented writer, a genuine genius of an editor, and a damn hard worker in his own right, Christopher Hood who more than simply encouraging me, recognized my work ethic more than my talent, and the severity of my subject matter as the dire situation of my home—which in some ways mirrored his own home life growing up—life rather than as overly dramatic adolescent angst. He never accused me of “just acting out for no reason,” as members of my family did.Chris Hood, a man who prioritizes empathy through the responsibility of his own actions rather than his words alone, became a true creative writing mentor to me, and would spend many extra hours speaking with me about poems outside of class, taking time away from his own work, and even checking in with me consistently to make sure I wasn’t making any plans for my premature death. Writing was the only thing that made me feel like what was happening in my house was real. It was the only place where I could trust that no one would try to dispute not only my truth, but a basic recollection of reality.In addition to my father’s unintentionally reckless yet nonetheless arrogantly neglectful and therefore insidious denial of my mother’s severe mental instability, on the rare occasions which he came to visit us (often forced to do so by my mother) in the first couple years after my parent’s separation, he made us feel that any negative feelings we had for our mother were not only our fault, but somehow immoral. As though by trying to establish reality, we were attacking our mother, disrespecting her. This was a clear projection of my father’s own failings. He had disrespected her. He had disrespected their marriage, refused to bear his weight in their union, but rather than taking accountability, he hid his guilt by constantly praising her. Still no bad word has been said by him about her. Not even the admission that she could have hurt us accidentally. But perhaps worst of all was the insinuation, the quite terrifying suggestion made at times by both my parents: that we wanted to feel this way. That we chose to hate my mother. I had to explain this to her once after she had angrily made the implication to my face. I almost proposed it to her as a question, as though I was reminding her of something I thought she already knew. “No child,” I said, “would choose to hate their mother.” This thought still troubles the memory of how my heart used to be, like slow ripples in an absent pond. I never chose to hate my mother. I was simply afraid of her. Someone may at times want to die. But no one wants to want to die.I never chose to hate my mother. I wanted to love her, I did love her, and that’s why I was able to hate her. I hated her because I loved her, but I was afraid of her, and afraid that after one of our arguments she wouldn’t go to sleep that night in her bed, that she would instead sleep beneath the cars. And my father had no interest in believing anything other than our anger to her being our own fault, being chosen. Perhaps he didn’t even believe it was his fault. Perhaps in truth he hated me. For I brought to fruition his greatest fear. I looked his ten-year old self in the eyes and said you broke your promise. This was something he couldn’t face. Something he couldn’t live with. Something he chose to deny. And in denying that my mother could abuse her own children, he could deny that he failed her. He could deny that when he abandoned her she fell apart. He could deny that he didn’t to his best to save the marriage. He could deny that the pain his parents caused him by getting divorced, was the pain he now cause us. And the pain his mother went through, the sobbing that would keep his 10 year old self up at night, was the pain our own mother now faced. He could not begin to tread upon such an honesty. And by living away from the truth, he could somehow believe that his promise was always meant to be broken. He could pretend that Juliet and Romeo were meant to die, and refuse to believe that Shakespeare had chosen to let them die. That my father had the power to save their marriage. But he could not face this, for it would mean in part that his own parents had abandoned him. That they made the choice to leave him. That causing someone pain can be a conscious choice. Perhaps he had denied his own role in his fate. Never realizing that the tragedy of a greek is not their fate, but their resistance to it. My father’s failing was not that he left us. It was not that he left my mother. It was that he was so afraid of feeling his own pain, he could not get himself to feel ours. His tragedy was not even that he lied to himself, or lied to us. His tragedy was simply that he refused to protect us from her.But in writing, I found protection. No one could invade my inner monologue, attempting to corrode my image of reality in order to blur the branding of their sins. Often it seems I was their mirror, and they did not want to remember the color of their souls, so they wanted to break me, they wanted me to forget what they looked like so they could forget what they had done. They wanted to shatter me so they could forget their past, and thus break free from the promise of their pain in self-reflection. It was the only place I could talk honestly about how badly I was doing without anyone trying to convince me I was exaggerating or making it all up as my father often did to both myself and my brother. And sadly my brother and I were so brainwashed, we often found ourselves doing this to each other. Sometimes we sat and asked each other openly, “Is this actually bad? Or are we just making it all up?”Once, after high school my brother had confronted my mother saying that she was abusive. My father called me angrily and I found myself passionately agreeing with him, that my brother was simply exaggerating and being dramatic or overly sensitive. I even set out several examples of physical abuse trying to make sure he knew that whatever pain he felt didn’t requite such severe terminology and was only truly terrible in his imagination. As my uncle often said, “At least she wasn’t an alcoholic and didn’t beat you up every night.” He often mentioned in response that his greatest fear growing up was that his father would kill his mother. And though I rarely felt secure enough to respond out loud, internally I told him that my greatest fear growing up was that my mother would kill herself, not because I was delusional, but because she told me she wanted to. It seemed my whole family was complicit in the conspiracy that my mother was just fine, and her kids hated her because they were shitty kids who wanted to blame her for everything wrong in our lives and every negative emotion they felt toward her they were hallucinating as a result of the false perceptions caused by hormonal adolescent angst. Often my mother has told me, “All kids get angry with their mothers.” As though she is somehow forgiving me for my completely unfounded fear of her. It’s only been in the last few years that I’ve understood the framework and terminology around my mother’s behavior, which likely falls under Borderline Personality Disorder. It was only through finally seeing a therapist that my mother wasn’t also seeing or in control of, that I was able to get enough distance from my indoctrination into her distorted reality to be able to understand the severity of my mother’s behavior, and begin to believe that my anger toward her was not only reasonable, but was not my fault, or my own creation. Even my uncle recently apologized, taking back his previous repetitive statement, after experiencing several episodes of her instability, and himself having been physically abused, admitted her anger was so intensely intimate, he felt as though she had physically hit him.In writing, I found a place where no one would deny a transcript of a conversation which just happened a few minutes ago, or refuse to apologize for something that happened several weeks ago because now they were able to use the passing of time to cloud the waters of memory with the compelling reasoning of their unkempt and unattended murky minds, in order not to have to address both the severity of their behavior, as well as the responsibility for changing it.However, outside of my interactions with my writing father, Christopher Hood, who saved my life several times over throughout this period, I was often scared to share my work. The catharsis and relief of my writing seemed only to survive in secrecy. For I have had my writing used against me by the people I was writing about after being read without my knowledge, I have had one of my poems crumpled up and left on the floor in my room, and I have had a family member accuse me directly to my face, after acting clinically disturbed, that I purposely want to be mad at them in order to have something to write about…Therefore, even the safety, the hidden tower that I had tried to create, the sanctity that I found in the secrecy of my writing was threatened by my mother’s boundless willingness to enter the hidden passages of my soul with the terror and despair of her own broken life, something which could not be seen outside of the anything goes safety of our apartment. It was only in those late hours when you could see the aggressiveness of her sorrow, which had blatantly weakened her soul and openly corroded her mind. Which though dramatically stated, often presented as Sunday night arguments which lasted till 2, 3, or 4 in the morning, or a yelling match caused by her insatiable desire to get me to try on new pants she bought me late at night even though I had told her days before I had more than enough pants, she couldn’t help herself from telling me how ungrateful I was while trying to force me to take my pants off and put the new ones on even though I was in the middle of doing my homework. Thus my fear, dishonesty, hiding of my emotions, with the absence of any emotional or physical boundaries, continued to increase.In order to further make clear the lack of boundaries my mother not only practiced but convinced us was normal, I will recall a quite embarrassing story of her making me take down my pants so she would spread my cheeks and look up my asshole when I was 17. Somehow she had intuited that my asshole was bleeding, and even though there was no sign of blood, thought it was urgent enough that we couldn’t wait for a doctor, and she should as soon as possible perform the exam. I don’t know why I did or how she got me to agree. Perhaps it was that she made it feel so normal. But your mother getting you to let her stare up her asshole when your 17 was just the kind of shit that got normalized in the hidden hours of my mom’s apartment.The only time I have ever considered stopping writing forever was when my mother suggested that I desired her anger, that I wanted her to hurt me. That I was making her angry so that she would be angry so that I could have some content to write about. That perhaps the only reason I was able to write was because of her. That the only reason I was able to write well was because she was giving me something serious to write about…Afterward, at 15 and In a desperate panic I tried to convince myself that there was something more in my poems than a chosen hatred, something more in the practice of my writing than a desire to be in pain. Something in my writing that had nothing to do with my family, or the pain that I knew they were causing me. Perhaps this is part of the reason why I have been afraid so long to write about what she did to me. Because somewhere in the riper adolescence of my heart, she branded me with the belief that to speak of her sins was to desire pain, for it was I who had compelled her to them. Such a truth was hard to deny, knowing that I had been the one to release my father from his self-hatred and free him from pretending he still desired their union, or had ever wanted to be married in the first place. She continued to insinuate, sometimes with subtlety, sometimes overtly, that it was my fault she was abusing me. That I wanted her to yell at me so that I could have something to complain about. She was saying that I wanted her to hurt me so I could be a poet. Perhaps she was abusing me so that I would abuse her. Attacking me then denying it, so she could say instead that I had attacked her. I began to suspect that perhaps she just wanted me to kill myself so she could finally have an excuse to do the same. In truth she tried to convince me not only that it was my fault she was yelling at me, that not only was I poking her, but it was I who had turned her into a bear. As responsible as she tried to make me for her new state of dissolution dysfunction and unpredictable agression, perhaps her accusation was not unfounded. It was I indeed who said that they could no longer be married. I was the reason her husband left her, allowed her husband the relief of leaving her. Perhaps she could not even accept that he would have left her. That maybe if I had kept my mouth shut that day, she would still be married. And I would be angry at my father instead of her. But at this period in 2018, finding myself stuck in a house an hour outside of Rio, in which one of my travel partners had broken his foot, and had been up three nights in a row doing coke with his brother, which is why we couldn’t make it all the way to Rio. with my other travel partner suffering from what he quite wrongly perceived to be yellow fever, who openly admitted that he didn’t like to travel, only after I had arrived in Brazil for three months, yet he would join the US military when he returned to the united states and end up fighting in Syria where he remains today. They ended up leaving me and heading back to the farm we had all been working on, saying that if I wanted to see Rio I would have to get there by myself. But before I went alone to Rio for two weeks, where I found myself once more in the exact solitude I was trying to avoid by coming on this trip in the first place, I found myself sitting in the backyard under a coconut tree I had drank from the day before, next to a rarely used playground, getting bit by mosquitoes, looking for the tiny monkeys that were the squirrels of the neighborhood, I found myself trying to write poems that would remind me it was the right decision to stay alive. But more importantly, I began to ask myself not how, but why I had allowed myself to get in this situation, and where I would be if I let it continue. I began to ask myself continuously: to what degree was I participating in the perpetuation of my own suffering?Having at that time written 8 novels, 15 books of poetry, yet told no one, and seeing no path to publishing or to being safely loved, I had kept my mind a secret, even from those who could have helped me, and thus I floated into even darker minds. At this time, I had just turned twenty, had yet to paint anything, had only just started learning to play piano, and had begun to despise writing, as much as I relied on it to keep me alive. Only through realizing I had somehow thought van Gogh didn’t kill himself, that he did kill himself, and that if I continued down the same path, I might produce some of my greatest work only to burn out and die the same, did I decide to let go of what I saw as my integrity, and turn around, walking back toward life, and eventually I was able to ask for help. Unfortunately I continued asking the wrong people, and after a much worse period fighting off daily thoughts of suicide, and trying not to make a plan, dealing with persistent self-hatred, and familial interactions which appeared to directly deny the possibility of my suicide, as well as emotional volatility which treated the consistently ominous prospect of my suicide almost as a familial necessity or fulfillment of a familial fate or prophecy that I refused to participate in by deciding that what I was being told was love was not in fact love, that love existed somewhere else, somewhere more honestly. Unfortunately, I think I thought that where the love was lost is where it could be found. Even realizing this, I was still left with many freshly ingrained internal beliefs of worthlessness, constant and repetitious thoughts of deep self-hatred and suicidal sentences, which repeated so often they almost seemed to begin to rhyme: “I should just kill myself. I should just kill myself, I’m gonna fucking kill myself. Shut the fuck up. No, I’m gonna fucking kill myself. I should just kill myself. I hate myself. I hate myself. I hate myself. I hate myself. I fucking hate myself. I should just kill myself. I’m gonna fucking kill myself. Shut the fuck up. I’m not gonna kill myself. Shut the fuck up. I hate myself.” I was lucky enough to find a great therapist, and began to rely increasingly on my uncle who had dealt with enough of his shit to actually be able to be there for me.This book is dedicated to the three men who saved my life.Paul Sireci, Christopher Hood and Christopher Curtis.Thank you for being how you are.A book without Judgement, I have been afraid to write this book for a very long time. Not only for myself, but because of the people who I love, the people who pushed me beyond my death, as grateful as I am to them for the lessons, I must speak the truth, otherwise I cannot share my lessons. But in order to speak the truth, I must be honest about the severity of abuse, neglect, and manipulation I experienced at the hands of my family. In many ways I have hidden this book from the world because I did not want to hurt them. I did not want to torture them by being honest about how they tortured me. But if the only reason I am still alive is because I have some desire to help others ease their own pain, if the only use for a painful person is to help those in pain. If the only way a victim becomes a survivor is in order to help others survive, then I have to say the most terrifying truth I live with everyday.That when I was the closest to suicide that I have ever been, my mother, father, and brother all treated me the worst they ever have in my whole life.That if I agreed with them when they said they loved me, that what they were doing was love, that I would be dead. That I would have killed myself three times. Once on the night when my mother mocked me to my face at the hour of my death, once on the night my brother broke into the locked door and screamed at me to forgive him, yelling at me that he was sorry, while I begged him to stop, sobbing in the shower, and would not stop though I continued to plead with him, until I jumped out naked and screamed in his face him to please stop, and I saw the horror in his face when he realized what he’d done. The next day he promised me he would go to therapy, which I had been asking him to do for the past several years. And once on one of the days I played basketball with my father, when I told him I was doing the worst I’ve ever been, and he wouldn’t even ask me “how are you doing?” I would ask him and then he would just talk about himself for the whole time, and then when he would leave, he would tell me he loves me. It is not so much the neglect, as the denial of the neglect. I don’t know how exactly to explain it. All I know is that they told me they loved me over and over and over again every single day, but I had to ask my mother and father if they would please ask me how I’m doing please just once a day at least. My mother was afraid of me, and my father was afraid to ask. I had to beg my brother for a hug after telling him how badly I was doing, and because I would not accept his apology, he screamed at me in the shower while I was sobbing, even begging him through tears, the only way I could get him to stop was to jump out of the shower naked and scream back at him until I began crying again, and he finally left me alone. I continued to sob the rest of the night, stopping only to tell my mother to please stop when rather than comfort me she began trying to diminish the severity of my brother’s behavior, saying “Pearce, relationships are difficult.” Perhaps in an effort to make sure I didn’t estrange myself to my brother.I know that I died that night. The brother I was, the son I was, I killed myself that night. The only person who survived was the nephew I am, the patient I am. If it weren’t for the financial privilege of premier quality therapy, if it weren’t for the love of my uncle, I would have had no more reasons to guilt myself into staying alive. I would no longer have been afraid that my mother would piggy-back once more on my suffering, killing herself now that she had finally collected enough trauma that no one would blame her, no longer afraid that she would follow me into the afterlife. I still don’t quite know what kept me alive. Perhaps only to remind you that it’s possible for you to stay alive,that it’s not your fault if you want to kill yourself,and that, if you don’t know it yet, or don’t remember,it’s okay to die.Note from author:It is important to remember that though at times these poems are severely depressing, that I survived this period of my life, to grow older, and, through difficult work, return my mind to kinder thoughts and finally come to agree with the possibility of happiness.And strangely enough, through learning to be more honest with themselves, through seeking extensive care for mental health, and having the luxurious privilege to receive more than adequate medical attention and care, my relationships with my entire family have improved, and we can all spend fulfilling time together, with increasing absence of conflict and emotional manipulation. And though I cannot think on it often, though I can rarely think on it all, lest I desire to pursue depression instead of happiness, though I still cannot consciously associate with those thoughts of what happened to me, though in many ways I must ignore this period of my life in order to continue to live, and pursue this second chance, this second life, I shall never forget what truly happened, I shall never allow myself to be deluded into thinking that I survived that period on anything more than letting my entire conception of the definition and practice of love as it had been told to me, die—I would never have survived that period if I had not been able to divorce myself from everything around me and believe that there was something more left for me than suicide. But do not let me deceive you; it was not a rugged individualism, nor a miracle that saved my life. It was a little bit of spiritual resolve, a little bit of wisdom, and an intense and obsessive amount of therapy and medical treatment.It is in this mind that I offer these poems which I wrote at 20 years old. How many days must I live at the end of my life?perhaps I should not have been a poetfor in the morning can I no longer dress my mind in solitudebecause i have not learned to love this solitude,and these dresses tight upon my mind begin to strain the worth from out of lifeand leave me much beneath the thoughts of love.so i shall change and keep on, so i shall change and keep on?such flowers melt upon my teeth that i cannot know of you.what is this? to pretend to be revered,to hate myself for trying the wrong ways to live.am i no further than i have been?you who see how i have spent my lifetell me what i ought to do,tell me what i ought to have done.tell me not to speak of loveor to speak of you, tell me i do not deserveto speak of loving you.Fugue UntemperedThen deceased I came across the wind;Several graying meadows mended by a thought of birds. (--unsewn pavement)Such trains could pass among the salted fieldsWhose paths the stalks could wear for years.Another quiet slosh of breeze relents two birdsA lease among the parting treesAs new autumn’s eve’s betrayedBy the hollow of the sun’s old gaze.Soft that night a trail was miles found.Then, across tonight, beside each quill, a flower.When new tomorrow’s sun arose to polish greenAnd bend along the land, I found the birdsWere thudding against my lap;More than feathers, petals in my hands.ThreeMay not my seething heart forget its rapture,that overture among my terminal soul;Let lay the flowers, cast between my mind,recall within their degradation of our timethat death can never be sublimeunless a life of love is lived in time.Bad Smell or Good SmellI see that monks are greedy,In hordes prefer serenity;Though some there are, more a fool than IPursue that peace as ecstasy.A mother is born within a barren child,Such a child scrapes across the land and livesTo be old and watch her mother die.Among the nooses of hatred,A rage disgusts her tenderness,And as old uses newly brown her heart, she wonders could deathdefy the soul. The children will not know,And when the children speak of the landThere will be no more branches, noMore bark. The skins of the trees will all be madeOf flowers; all the earth will be stories,And people will forget the land.But nor to sit within the purest pond,Love is to drink the dirty water,For rage cannot dissuade my tenderness,And something of peace collects me dearly,But they will not know what is a pond.They will not know what is a flood.They will say the dirt was made of green flowers,And many fish could walk.It will be said that a lone savior tried to warn the earth,That in our foolishness we could not see our fate’s collapse.And that will be a lie.Cold the moonlight warms my breast,It is the soul defies death;It is the soul defies death.So, to speak of flowers too oftenIs to depose the integrity of trees,But when the children speak, softnessWill lose its distinction, and days untie from nights,For beauty doesn’t need us to survive.For I Am Not My ChildTo sew upon my natures daren’t reasonI would not forgive lest love admit loveWithin the wrong mind has kept a fire kindled.Yet, I am unwilling to become deathUntil I want my life again.I mean to starve the maladies from out my rotting graceAnd fester further into pureless laceWhich crowds the eye of tempests blackTo let the light into the darkness of the soul. Lo,Shut broekn death from out my heart for youHave not undone my passionAnd you are not my eye,But light plagues my windowEven when it’s closed at night.Fatigueif i may touch glorywithout that resolve in patienceto find serenity in passion’s wake,then i have held no gloryand owned no stalwhart grace.as, slow, i sicken across your lipsi am endured no longer,and the columns which held oncemy gums apart. now may fear some leechesfor i have drunk the pond,and cold in heeds of laughterthe reeds trade rhythms with the water, but i cannotshed my sins if i’ve no oneto shed them with.so i believe that love is not peace,that love wanteth not itself,and peace is some strangerto be built, not found.so, in finding neither,i mistook the world.and though at last a bitternesshas long attended me, fatiguenow settles in my spirit.yet,own page)so passionate am i among my sickness,I begin to tire my disease.Seveni am not death,i am not death as i see that i am,as i see the weaker bodies of me die and pass me,i have no time for death, i have no time for sweets.so smooth across my breast a hollow misery,death would not stoop to share her thoughts with me but iknow the failing thoughts which led me allto die before, i see the hangings,i see the unsplattered splatters,i know the strangers frightened to see the death they see.i see the child will never forget me.to these i am no stranger. stranger am ito sit still as i do, untolerated by madness,unassuaged by the fear of my position,i am uncompelled by the pleasures of insanity.though i dance quite angrily upon the beatone must understand that this is not the way i speak,but i speak of pain in other ways,of sickness, it has not done right with me.low passions now attend my constant nature,i now understand of love the ruthlessness of my commitment,i understand the desire not to be estranged,but as i regard myself quite unquietly misframed,i allow the structure of my institution to deride which rotting bricks.veils blind the blind the bride to the demon they have yet to see,and i study the rapture of my integrity,three separate winters preserve the pinkness of my mind,and what rarity remains i shall keep freshin the coolness of a basement protected by good rats,as though a melon veiled by its rinde, i chew alone;yes, i am not death, i am not death. and itake unmeasurable pride in this.the simple fact i may take pride is some vague measurement.but very like the bride i am to life,confused by the groom who says he loves mebut will not admit he likes to push me away.i have never chosen my veil. i have never wanted it.others have chosen it for me,so i will forget what they did.but i shall choose not blindness, nor estrangement.only through the tangled arteries between the heart and brainam i willing to agree with love’s new definition.and though i shall hold no grudge,i shall only accept in my marriage to lifethe remaining hope of that groom’s better commitment,if i may be a bride not veiled for their protection;to protect them from the eyes of their decisions.The Children Wear Hats NowInto the chantless hours of the deadly orange morn,Into the years which pass between the sun’s dismay,I think to drive several green cattle into the yard,And the cows maw sweetly on the soft heads of children,And the children learn what is to be the grassAnd grow sad; vegetarianism loses its pacifismAnd their weakened hearts are bought for freeBy cheaply grassless candy, and the way the owlCarries that mouse within its stomach; all thingsBecome fear, and the seas are like an open woundWherein, however blue, unwilling are the childrenIn such blood to swim, and to smileAs that translucent juice feels to burn upon them,Or is that just the warmer rage of the sun’s agreement?The Grace of The BurdenIn bread which sops up graying thoughts,some hollow gaiety endures the use of meand then, tiring the sun upon my face,I pour the raisins of my lard undressedwherein marbled fellows all abrown their waysto travel time that they rebuke humanity’s inventionof the cage, and thousands of parrots regainthe use of the beating of their heartstoo fast inside their wings and sodo many human eyes unbrass:each year of a cage in a life a life slogs past;some several million years of us are stolen all in one;in dying thoughts the skies reflect the grass.and for whom does the water grow still?may no science brush off the moldy soul—what shameit is to die within a cave withoutthe star’s caress on blackness, but nowthe hallowed force of parrots climbing in and out of chests,each year of a cage in a life slogs past;may the water only still if fish are swimming down inside.do not, near sleeping, pine for the blue sky,nor practice the hatred of your cage,for the day has disappeared already.or perhaps that’s only optimism’s lie,for nothing truly disappears at night.Of DickinsonAs though for begging dangers i had thoughtof the ripened soul too sweet it got—in the palace of her fear her house became the earthand seems for several years unended she knew few blatancies,as though only the lees of tragedy could be her plague,may the sweet waters of the mind once rest, take easeand let the days become the world, or in the night’s ignore the sky;it may be fed wounds which prayed her stay inside,but i watch that many years were treaded underfootuntil no longer other feet would tread beside,and minds as much as hers became the myths of rhyme,for naught but fascination could lasting hold her tongue,and years passed as months, and months as yearsso in her time death passed before it cameuntil a mind of love returned her time to life again,but the subtle passages of solitude she could not undo,for ‘haps some fear distilled in her her eyes above her feet the static earth,when she at last maintained the treasure of a tiny worry,that perhaps the world outside was not as grandas she commanded it to be.or perhaps her solemn heart was meant to feed the grass,and I am meant to only love the grasses,for to think i know her is pretend.Eleventall thoughts embed the womb, and carriageslark black beneath a summer pregnancy. it leansthat the fallow grace of indigestion now accosts the embryo,and grave graves well-looked upon become some taste themself,for who does not speak of the wealth in death?it is always heard that low eves aggress their ink,that in t-ying things away i tie away my soul,and plaid rages submit a sadness for their afterbirth.what’s done is not always done;what’s done may often be undone.it is a wasted lie to eulogize a prospect misery,as the womb is like a bath, usuallyi do not see a golden bath in death,and like low eves braid old ink across their brow,misery is not inevitable.Twelvei walk on the backs of elephants and take in the night air.this must have angered them for they stompedopen my chest and suckled all the water out.i am nutrients for elephants,this is chiefly my pride and itis impossible to return to a normal life;to a life before i was useful to the elephants i will not go.but i still don’t think they like me,i think they just pretend we have compatible personalitiesbecause they want to drink from the silk of my lungs,and dress their bellies with a human cottonso they may say to all their friends:you see that boy, that boy whose chestdroops inward? he tried to trample us one night.Upon His Hellish Face The Rain Would Singe?In baking all my sins beneath my father’s yellow casket,I find more than i my father needs themto compare my hell with his. Little sandwichesdecree the end of mourning, timeto celebrate the life he lived:I recall how the dog liked himAnd how when it was raining he would ask“Why is it always raining?”No, to me such a devil did not belong to him,but the flames of his i had to lickwere tasted by the singing fermentationof his fateless indifference, whichtrod across my nearly cureless gaze, and whenin my such partnerless times i asked him of his day,he answered lengthy, but would not ask me how was mine.Betrayallet not my state of joyreflect the ease of my life,for then my lungs would fall openand i would understand no thing.FifteenGray uses tender at my thighs,and soaps amend the fishwho kneel too sleek withinthe sullen pond unhingedfrom trees reddened by the dusk’s ripe mist.lay the partridge to warm upon my lungs;unsplayed a girth of worthy feathers playabout my barren skull and crudeelations endure a forceful irrigationof love coarsed to sour grief;how flayed the fresh red souls ofchildren fooling kings, and singupon the gnawrled lees adjoin my lips to my teeth.bald raucous drought my chizzled sorrowso i decree upon the nation of my souldeprave the frightened roles and lay upon my basket a drought of poisonmarrow, have not the childrenseen my way? how my kneesdo not buckle as i walk,and how i do not needa poofy chest to feel my honest pride.Gray uses no more tangle for my thighs,and i employ all the fish to make soup,where all sullen ponds become the ocean,and the trees caress the fish within their branches.Crude ElationsThus i begin the horrid doubting new sorrow’s premonition,Wherein such treads of fingers gravely ’temptTo hang upon the ladder of my gaul—the ribsof my lungs, displaying several sorrows;i flay the several sorrowslike breaking the spines of dying fish,so as the children refrain to eat their bones—my sorrows starve from me so easily!For I know the greed in which some holdtheir pain and grief—recycling;So haps the death won’t disappear,Just steam from off of me.For I know the greed they treat their grief:wherethen no premonition exists!I find I lure the promised joys,From out the broken promise of greenmy casket—not yet ripened,that stir within my leaking marrow;i taste the cream inside my bonesso may i deplete the common greed for easeand then my pangs are not like shiny things,nor as something I were paid,but all of passion is a skill!and i myself have trained.Then, breaking yellow sorrows upon my nape,I rob myself a jewelry of scars,broke tilings distrain my mindand blue durations despise to knowthey are only passing through my soul.And I Doubt That I Am SweetSo shape the grasses bound to lift my chin,I wake as stranger roses dry my tongue and eyes.Eyes are not well worn enough to behold the well-worn sky,And so drags black cape behind the moon the night.A yellow pasture drifts and grieves,But does not peel like the winds who drape beneathThe hollow whistle at the cave’s wide mouth:That giant lung which sits like a carcass,A whale on the midst of birchbark hills, now yellow,Always yellow like the wind has passed through a bookAnd stayed. In the waring pages of the dying grassesLies an aging lung and misses not its body.Here beneath the greedless organ sits my mother,Chewing on the newly plumper fruits inside.For In My Heart I Dance Upon My MindSome of paceless nature agitate my sorrow; severitieshave of some manish rhythm percluded callous castswhich price away my guilt—irrevocable, i mourn the loss of shame, but none have starved a saltedheart, for hearts like this but freshen barrel’s gift.i make of strange thoughts a worthy reticence;for tying on my noose a basket,i lift the waters up a tree to freshennests of birds who lack blue majesty.but of my heart i wear across the grass, i find my meat is stained with green.And all who now recall me, the birds,the bats, the red’ning bees — we tasteof ponds most gently, and the windtickle-s our skins away.Shall Truly Death Impound Our Sins?Naught but fellowed lodgings derived before the soulMight excrete the poisons known in goldWhere then the hoax of greed descendsTo lay across our isle its holy sham.New our deadly perceptions shall impound these sins?Neigh, our names remain in children’s calloused eyesWe blistered once behind to stir the smell of cautionIn their world before their innocence let butcher them from time.Yet, racked within our doubts beneath the ground,Might the lozenges we suck upon of maggots sweetly brown,Tickle old commencement, as though the crime of innocenceCould not be only once committed,And what we stole from children they might return in aging missionsBefore arrives their deadly wisdom’s sinless grin.TwentyGlow the clays beneath the grass,I taste the soils, soils in hand. And as the rains some watch so break apart the land,I take too many worms in palmTo wash, and freshly clean returnThem to the earth, as I return beneath the rainsWhile thought of sand as glass as grain,But discovering in no precious solitude my eyesUnbrewed by hearts of treachery so crudeThey lull the soul to sleep in souring treesWithout the thought that there is always time to grieve,I lay across my grave so sweetThe years to come of many flowersSent by me.Twenty-OneDismembering the poison parts of me,I decide of time that sorrow is a thiefAnd blend the hours sawn from griefInto the newer printings of the soul’s receiptWhere then my joy are like a mangeUpon the gnawing furs of sorrow,For I then delegate the duty to my happinessOutside the fingers of society, and into the palms of partnership,Where I regard newer beings who desire to regard me.Such are the older and more beautiful uses of friendship,Wherein the soul does not commit itself in ignoranceTo Too grand a state of self-reliance, where arroganceAlone compr’ends the desire not to lessen its burden;For the soul was never meant to live alone in selflessness.Perhaps in order to live well, and beyond our grace and hurdle,We must endure the soul’s recital to a witness,And many more than that.Twenty-TwoHow must I fashion the placenta of my heartTo insure that myths of treason grown in starsShall not so war like eggless larks,As to raze my doubt to bloom bare yards,Then pimple flowers on a faceless hill,And caressing your neck within my mouth,Feel the warm stirrings beneath your skin.What of you I know I have forgotten;In your absence I filled you in my soul with cottonThat might your waring age not bale on me,As though the twine of worlds desire I be wrapped with wheat,So seeing you, you could not dance with me,But now through lakes of fallen history I sieve my chest,And do not doubt my lips across your breast.Twenty-ThreeFor death remain the glee of sorrow,And as those who love to hate those who loveTo hate, I change the diaper of my grief,And show such greasy passion to them who wishHarassing me for how they think I’ve lived:Then smell of my greenish sorrow — I mustBe worthy-worth it, have the right to live.But such as I am clean, I neverHave desired the proof of their gaze, maybe IHave—but how now the prospect of their grainy judgementWould hang too sweet upon my weakened shoulders.Do they know what weakened shoulders is?For I have found no consolation without judgement, I have found no love which simply is.No one, No one knows of how I’ve lived.And few speak honestly of death—But less and less I desireA woundless kiss upon my agony—I shall never explain any pain to any lover,For the fate of my soul is tied to no other.Twenty-FourMocking fame, I do erase the names on gravesAnd sobbing gruellishly begin to use the names myself. I goTo visit my new grandchildren; several tendrilsOf a foreign passion mark upon my daughter’s house,But faces are repaired by thoughts repockedBy words upon me from their shedding souls, andThe children are so well; my children are well,For they had got to say what they had not.Into town, I draw a corpse along new soul’s extremitiesAnd then such doggish years repose the grief of all my fathers;The same now dissipate the plight of all my mourning mothers,“I have come home again,” I say to them, “I have come home.Be, be at rest — you may die before me now.”Thus in blush of memories, and old or broken eyesDo I become to them the love I wasBut now I know of what I’ve done and I—considering new sins and how to freshen my atonements,Return toward the graves to learn why I’d done what I did,And though I remembered all my names,Few recalled their reasoning, and most recalled their pain.Twenty-Fivein plagues of grace some human treads upon the earthfor they too often find in moral adages the soul reversed.death allow the hearts undress its tatters,but lemonade now drips behind two earsas one patent summer comes to solve the flowers;filling the divot of their hat with chestnuts, they rememberone cannot speak of mourning death at birth,for as a thousand trees over the years may spread from these,they knew a babe, who deeply in the chamber,in the big white place with the doctors afterwardsone cousin said too many times, “oh if onlyMarley were here, marley should be here;why can’t marley be here to see this—it’s just not right.”And a hundred years later the child died of murderSo one must never speak of death at birthHeritage Of Those Who Tie Violence To Intimacy,And Those Who Believe Love And Abuse May Proceed Together, Justifiably.I live as though my heart were not untouched by lasting company.But to think the proof I have of love is weak!As I break apart my deadly grief, I let myFears rile under me, and recalling deathIs not a word I propel toward serenity; ICompell myself toward and through more useful pains.I do not base my habituations of loveOr my values on the behavior of my family.What naive use would that be?I graduate myself from sorrow, obtaining solitude’s degree;I base my values on humans who practice values honestly.I do not base how I love on those who did or did not love me.I love in the manner of humans who love well, and honestly;These lovers, I study, and an honest loverI am willing to do the necessary work to be, For the more I study, the more I see—There is proof of love—good love—endlessly, and so I liveAs though my heart were not untouched by lasting company.Twenty-SevenSuch as I am, I am not undead;I walk the lanterned hills with much suspicion.Where is the gameskeeper who bore my children?Did I not do as I promised and sell my soul for corn—It must be the wind when he was sleepingThat swept him down the marrowed hill, for whereHis chest went blue and fluid filled my childrenHad to eat the trout to live. And then theyBuried my husband, whiteWith his head gone soggy in the grassAnd the trout been suckled off his lips,So then that — when they buried him,They could not plant across their father one last kiss.Then, in grainy tears, spurning this morningTold me of the failure of the gameskeeper’s commitment.Thus, to his grave returning, we cut open his chest,Put away his organs, and bailed out the fluid,Filling him in with dirt, we planted several flowersSo may he decompose, but as our kisses they yet yellow grow,Disputing the awful odor of his gargled soul.Twenty-EightThe words you’ve said don’t sizzle in my mind,but they fog between our souls so yoursno longer tries to spit on mine. Youknow better than to mock me at thehour of my death; and i know as wellnot to love you anymore the way i did—but it is not i, as you have so accusedme, who takes my love away from you it isyou, who stole it from yourself!for my love is always here, mylove is always hear for thosewho deserve it, and treat me well, but you—you do not respect my love, youhave spit a mucus in my cup of blood,and tried to make me reinfuse it;you attempted to convince me that the clot itmade which nearly stopped my heart,was of my own nature, wishes, and creation.Twenty-NineThis morning many bears carry me through the forest;I think I am not bound to die.In the evening, malted rosesSinge across my spine the sun’s red glaze and IDo not remember to escape.I am asked to mend one of the bear’s coats;A hole in neglect had torn wider in her side.I am cautioned not to take my treatment lightly.I am told to drink my soup slowly, and look into the sun.By the fourth day, the bears have eaten my tongueAnd made me take some time for myself.I am blind now, and the bears sound very far away.My soup tastes bitter, and it is the evening;I think I am not bound to die.ThirtyIn timing the geese which graze upon my back.I see it takes them very long to be at peace with me.As i devine a hobbled death i die—for one cannot approach a kind of passingwithout to covet the passing itself.What a terrible disease is the mindUpon the soul—I have no use for death;I cannot use my death, the bloodlessCinnamon with which I chew my teeth.I am not to say the things.Good death, Bad death, stale seasoning;I sell the beatings of my heart for music’s sake,but i am paid only half a penny for a thousand beats.and with this money I shall pay you to turn away from me.For what I have to say is not worth love or moneyAnd shall never compare to looking in someone’s eyes.Thirty-OneI knew once an alligator who whoredHis claws for sharper monies,And wounded several of his bygoneChildren, trying not to kill themOr let the monie die. And when his heartFell upon the grass like an egg,The red yoke felt my tongues;I looked at his youngest children,Considering what it takes to sharpen the soul.The alligators wore tiny hats as they walkedAnd I set several tea-cups on their backsStirring the sugar on their bodiesBefore I drank the warm brown fancy,And unscrewed all their teeth, softening Their fates. “Why,” they said to me through margled words“Are you so arrogant,” and trembledThrough the dewless grasses, leaving their tea behind.Thirty-TwoAs I discorporate these sorrows from my bodylike a wretchid meat, caution the blackness of my heart;Such passionless refusal I see attendsyour hands and feet.Has your heart no thoughtful company?Ah, I see you’ve lost your soul inside your phone.And think you are still living humanly.Death is a blind greed, hallowedIn the patient halls of hollow misery,For death tolerates no sorrow,And what of my chest, missing,The inside of my veins I cannot see,I would rather burden death today,than deny the very possibility of my hypocrisy.Thirty-ThreeAs death impress upon the soul the nautious waters of the mind, I dine//With two good rabbits and a woman named Eileen.Bless not the culture of a soul’s diseaseBut praise the blood which flows yet through water /in redStreaks keeping alive the thick-faced walrus,And harking on the laughter of a cautiousChild, that fear is born in the bodyAnd not the world. EileenPraise the rabbits red quilted coats—I am not so precious, “the pastaIs fine—I would’ve used more tumeric.”“There was no more tumeric.” “It expired.”“It expired?” “I threw it out,” said the rabbit.“Tumeric never expires,” I said and took it out ofThe garbage to dress upon my plate. BothOf the rabbits looked at me as thoughBeneath my bones was bright orange meat.“I am going,” I said, “Out in the streetTo speak about tumeric with the people.”“Please,” Eileen said, “Stay for dinner.”“I did,” I said, “I did stay for dinner.”“You did not stay for dinner,” she said.“You did not,” the rabitts said, shaking their heads in agreement.“Fine,” I said, “Let my father come to the houseAnd speak about your souls.”“Does your father use tumeric?”I nodded, “Perhaps too sparingly.” All eyes were downcast,And a fool dressed in false rags limped throughThe screen door, “Fresh leakings of a poisonMind do drip upon the heart unchimedBy winds who pass sweet by to grayAnd break not taste the newest rinde—thenCarry of my soul within your breastTill at last my life is rhymed by—”“Enough!” said the rabbits, “Enough!”“Please,” they said, “We will use more tumeric next time,Take your father away from here.”Thirty-FourFor I know that hollow people may sing unhollow songs,I do not know that gaieties grow gray in drovesBut I shan’t let my body sharpen my soul.Nor my face sculpt my mind — I shannotLet my heart believe restrictions.No past poison or passion shall instructThat infinity which with I pursueA new and patient intensity, withone who will share their patience with me.Thirty-FiveShall i commit myself to raping rapistsAnd killing murderers or would thatTie my fate to praiselessly to theirs.For more do we—do i regard the use of praise or solving prideor must we so deserve the praise for all our pains;I rape the rapists and hide my pain away.What tears I have are just for humans,I care for no one person, I care notfor all the world, praise me that Ihave not lost faith in serenityand my serenities, though severalgenocides now glaze upon the world,but when you praise me for my pain,I look away from the earth and find my peace.Thirty-SixDeath blind the fools’ caress and allThe thoughts they hold beneath their breast—like fluids, water swells within the skulland blends the fleeting eyes with shallow souls—I climb beneath the suns and seeWhat I have not done I’ll do with glee.Holding several bananas in my orange casket—The youth is all too jealous of me.Any soul well known is but aShallow myth unseen, I pace the ruinationOf my body, as fate’s young years decreeMy heart’s still growing; I shall eat bananas, endlessly,And like the skull of many children, tightening,my soul grows larger and larger than my brain.Thirty-SevenAnd the passing down of many souls untied—The wind floss my teeth and I am abashed,Wordless memories condemn my friendless days.it is that possum, which drifts in the yardi rub its yellowed belly and say to the police“Don’t worry, everything is under control,”but they shoot each other anyway, friendly-fire-group-suicide-No! No Suicide!I apologize, suicide i’ve overdone these days,but it was not me this time! the policewere simply compelled—undone by thehorror of the government’s systematic education crimes.the cops cared nothing for their own small deeds;they were just mad they couldn’t kill the governmentfor putting people who eat grass in cages.Thirty-EightBashing my soul against its grave, I do untie my fateless fate,But I cannot caress the world within my gaze,Nor bare to mime her soul’s dyslexia,Attracting suspicions of a pagan grace,Like believing one must know too many severitiesIn order to make a life described in blood and lace.For such a fascist lie we might diminishThose who peddle it, but grace I’veSeen we lay weary in failed romantics:One always admires the soul’s attempt at restoration,But rarely desires the cures of statelessness,Such as those who are still dead or dying—Or living! Who cannot speak the truth of death or life, not for their passion andNor for their pain, but that they’re yet unwillingTo describe their sorrows irrevocably, or admitwhat honesty of blame they must obdure within their pain,or dismiss the potency of other passioned lieslike to ask the most difficult questions,and be willing not do dieEach Morningperhaps for happiness, i wash of death across my brow,so knowing love is big fear’s taller afterbirth,as i set upon my gaze a restless joy,I set my leaking soul beneath. embeddedin the untied womb one findsthe soul’s protection from the sins of godand though we needn’t fear—to love,i find i cannot ruminate whole worths of melodyuntil i reminisce entirely of dissodenceand recall that ease is time’s deceptionso must i at least adore that last commitmentwhich reminds that grace needn’t be a corpse in times of burden.and grave appreciation of the life we liveneedn’t disappear in years of absent horror.In Truth Her Love Is ScurvySlow falsehoods balance in her sighsAnd what she cannot repent, she denies.Then lusty plagues of desperation triedTo guillotine but agitate her ruminationsSo the meditations of her soul subsideAnd but for knowing lavish wounds impressTo decorate upon the mind of god,She might think of death as pride.I think I know her mind is scurvied;For leasing all my heart inside the devil’s grace,Chewing on the marrow of grade A spines,My eyes, full of more than salted love,I wound the devil by loving him too well,with citrus he tries to sticky her sicknessSo might the skin advise itself to strengthen.Ah, what good to speak of bad things,—I have bought several bannanas today,Some of the flowers were still on their limbs,And to feed the willow—those who chew in faceand spit in shadows—I cannot blamedeath, I cannot blame the children. But the devil is not my child,And the devil has no children.There were times when i despisedmyself for hating her but then I learnedIt was not I who made me hate her; I rememberedIt was she who convinced me it was I who chose to hate her.Such had she plagued mewith an impoisoned sympathy, manipulating empathy.Now of sympathy do i conceivethose worthiest limits of empathy’s decree:we may love those who hate,but we needn’t love their hateful deeds.Forty-OneDeath is nothing like the windAnd those who say it isShall die tomorrow eveningWhen the sun has slowed the purple skyAnd all of hearts refuse to sigh.If death is like the wind--you think,Then death is not your song to singPerhaps resume a separate pride.But your death requires not my miseryof you I don’t deserve to cry.For I have not done enoughTo admit I love you as muchas I do, but I am not allowed to cry for you,lest i admit we could’ve beentogether, that perhaps there was something different,but we had our time, we had our choicesand you didn’t need to love meso i thought you shouldn’t be convinced. Forty-TwoUnslurped, the dregs of my dying i leavefor others to refuse to believe; dispassioni leave for the wolves. marking grace,on the whites of my eyes i paint—so none may report me bitterly—not a wider iris, but i surround my sightwith trees, and let me be grateful:let me say that i am grateful,as several ashes crumble off the ribbonsof my spine. momentary deeds rejectthe theme of time. and solemn deedsundo each other by the night’s white howl;shave of my ribs this red and marbled smock.i pair upon my doubts your gayest thoughts.in disease of terminal sadness i refute such endlessness,as i recall that joy is here forever,and that ripe oranges sometimes fallonto the heads of passinghungry dogs.Forty-ThreeI want to grease my tongue between the pockets of your soul,but i know I will not get what I want.You must not be frightened of me, finally,For I could not’ve been writing of youThis whole time. I have no desireTo understand your leprosy—I am perhapsWilling to love you if you have leprosy,I am willing to love you even after you get leprosyBut I refuse to love you because you have leprosy;I am not so foolish as to adore destruction.I have seen enough of disappointing souls by now.I would like to kiss you when your eyes don’t bleed.but i know i will not get what i wantso long as I believe I won’t get what I need.Forty-FourAs i, like a poison, irrigate with gaiety my sorrowAnd, souring my grief with joy, dilapidateMy use of solitude. I begin to strikeUpon my life with the integrity of poems,That might my days endure a passionSuch as I’ve restrained within these pages.For, once, I nearly needed death to saveMe from too strong an oath I’d made,But now I see I sacrificed a brief but harrowedInterruption of my secret reputation and thus doggid embarrassment,Learning I needn’t give my life to keep my word,I briefly let all dissipations survive my mind,Until I restored that as I live my oaths still breathe,And, keeping my life, I sacrificed no dignity.May the integrity of my darkness,be the foundation for a truer narrative than death;a new history, once preposterous—still joy exists in prospect’s tortured mind,then may we live, to prove the durabilityof good days, and wider feelings.Not For The Kid Who Froze To Death A Month Ago,But For The Kid Upstairs Who Killed Themself This Afternoonperhaps it is awful that you’re dead;maybe you feel very warm and tickled now—perhaps you have left all your sorrows behind;there is no more cloud wreathed around your heavy skull,perhaps her whole family passed into the nightand she had no more obligation to this world;It was maybe always meant to be this way.Now her children will not despise herFor leaving them too soon, for they never lived.Perhaps she was very thirsty, dying of thirst,And filled in her soul with the sweet waters of death.Perhaps she was a rapist, and her family will never miss her;Maybe she is glad to have left her body.Apparently, the third week of school she knocked on our door and gave us cookies,Perhaps if we’d only done the same.Forty-SixAs I price away the salt of my wounds,I see that I have sold my salt and wounds already.But to whom have they been soldAnd of my resolution, my reconciliations,have I attempted to reconcile with thosewho care not to stitch up their hidden slitsfor the pain the needle might cause them?Yes, I see I have been willing to reconcilebefore I had proof of their willing abandonment.Thus it is my fault, all my fault toforgive the wrong people and recycle my horrors:I have been too empathetic—I have been stupid:HA! Such suffering of me they would like /to reprieve their shame, but like a greekwho fights their riddle, they devise their fate.They compell their shame by denying their guilt has reason,needs attention, needs scrutinyfor more than their own sake, but I!i have not been too empathetic,i must simply choose more wisely,and perhaps look at those whose sufferingis external, is not internally delved to perpetuate.these humans i will know will not take my heart for grantedand will not toss around my life only to hate themselves thereafter,as though abusing me was their self-torture.But I must not speak of this too clearly,For then I speak of treachery so great,only musics might sustain, for telling this storythe letters would singe through words, and pages burn away.Forty-SevenIt seems I shall never shed all the poems from my soulUntil my soul sheds me, but I shall holdNo weary death within the casket of my gaze:You cannot find my soul inside my eyes, my heart within my face;These eyes my soul has always planned to leave behind,And when what of me shall pass does pass through death, this spiritwill shed my name, as though a fresh-cut stonemay last to lose its wording to the rain. /Into mindless peace my thoughts shall not all ever dissipate,And more my eyes were meant for birds to eat,But I shall not spare all the wishes from my heartsoulFor I cannot keep this life for now if not to love some things.And, kissing the wooden lids of many graves,I go to meet the vicar and the groundskeeper to go to meet the bears;Thousands of tiny sandwiches are left over from today.Forty-Eight“Much would I adore to halve my sorrows,I might find my humor poor, and my soul poured out.”“Why do you hate me? I am just tryingto be like you the best human I can be.”“because I think your soul is made of chemicals.”Listing into my heart the poison of your needsYou then resolve to aggravate serenity’s integrityFor have not your foul hours forced mine to bleedsimultaneously, as though your fear necessitatea partner in your suffering, so instead youfind another to bring you out of caverns,but not for sake a pal’s escape, rather,you grin to bring the others in to stay and watch you weep so as you blacken their soulsyet in their hearts you may be free.Forty-NineRefusing to impress you with my sorrows,I then deceive across the rainslike several passing seasons,drying all the flowers which come beneathmy shadow’s gracious awning. grailof many soups i pass the tongueabreast the salted rim, and asi saw my father whimper for the night begun the day,so may the dog know he’s not the only oneafraid,i should rather sing like swollen branchesneading muscled petals in their oakwith thickened waters of the rain,for like the trees i know, to whimperas the dawn sets spells upon the landdid only make the dog’s life more frightening,for none in fear need fearful company.And so like many autumn bears i sing,And meet many singing dogs along my way.and needn’t weep for all our smiling;drying each other’s flowers in the rain.I Know No Mild FeelingWhen I know peace,I hold no mild way!Serenity cools over melike a sweet plague.Fifty-OneDarkened oranges resist the tongue of trickled maggots,And as the calloused juice repents within their maggot souls,To confess of deeds to recent, is to promiseSome untested empathy; so as the maggotsPoisoned sweet do die between the skin and orange meat,God ammends contagious blossoming, wherethen each maggot pops before it penetrates,Dozened suddenly of baby flowers are the pores,No longer recognized as fruit, and therefore food,the oranges drop between the grasses to becomenew trees, but not before the right amount of beescome by to tickle each new face.A Common AspirationI suppose in death and heaven, We’d like to laugh, love, speak andLive without remorse.Fifty-ThreeI touch upon your soul a tradeless gift:I had brought you supper whenyou weren’t hungry and made you eat it.And when you needed it, i gaveit all away to a man whose debtyou must now repay, for hewasn’t hungry either and ate it anyway.Do not slosh upon the stage a coddled misery;What suffering you have you must resent,Unless you are wise, there is no other suffering.But dress across your heart a mimed elation,I saddle in my smile, and toContinue show’n my teeth, I kick myself:/I kick them outThe only way I find to calm my heart is fear’s evisceration,I have no shelter from passion,Then touch upon my soul a tradeless gift;Make of my heart a silent reservationWherein the night strides without cautionand licks around the sun the sky’s red glaze;And this new society’s greatest social prideis bravery in grace of fear as many fearlessdays pass by with injuries to the bodybut not the mind, for cautious wisdomin my heart i find is rarely wise,and so these children take of bread betweenthe earth, and where i walkthere are children in my heart,but no one is walking behind.Then touch upon my soul a tradeless gift:Make of my heart a silent reservation whereinThe nights stride without caution, and nightsPass through my heart like days as bravery,Wherein grace of fear, malted rosesSinge across my back the sun’s red glaze,and I need no one behind me.Fifty-Fourhands beneath my dress addresswhat it is i have beneath my dress:i maintain several tiny buffalo,suckled upon my browning breast,the hands are often surprised,and thus i am turned away,as though such a woman as i am —no romance may i sustainwith men who of more than bison are afraid.perhaps one day they might know my heart contained in theirs, and not turn their soulsunder their eyes when i tell them of my buffalobefore i tell them of my name, and, their hands,feeling my brown breasts, will not feel ashamed.Fifty-FiveI defy any day to pass me byWithout appreciating my love, or understanding the severity of my reverence;I belove each day and revere each nightMore of myself I shall not give to death than life;I defy any day to pass me byWithout savoring my veneration, or comprehendingthe severity of my reverence: for IBelove each darkened morning, so may i endureEach grain of day, and revere the soul of night.It is not of my heart to beat too slowly.It is not of my art to live softly,For that I take of violence for my vigorI pass each hour as though a dying day.It is that I worship the foundation of my hardshipThat I agree a hardened mind is not allowed to liveTo die; No minute passes which I desire not to kissFor I have already committed suicide;Death holds my body, Death holds my mind.All my fate agreed that I must die,That fame would cloud my death,And holding a black funeral, my familyWould cry and said what they did not believeWere lies; thousands of misunderstandings would survive.And none would see my deathas having marred my work — but i—I let death pile down its handsin my throat. my heart end, my eyesGrow falsely peaceful. Bad smells dress-my warm escaping soul. black saltwould freckle the innerds of my tongue;All the words I said were words enough.All the work I did was work enough,I died a gruesome bard, my namemy face — my eyes betraying mebetraying all knowledge of what I was.Poor death? No, poor the life glad to leavethe world’s sorrows all behind.But this I have excrutiated—In knowing death I took reprieveAnd I have had some time away so that I knowWhat and How it’s not to breathe.I am dead! I am dead! I am death!So how could I come now backOnly to waste my breath?It seems that none believe my death but I,But these (the) same would not have so survived,For neither did I — my fate decreed too soonThat I should die too young;Or having worked too hard and burned too quick my wick,but I do not now live as such a woman or a boy,I live as a gleeful ghost, a gracious thief, a happy spectre;For I have stole a second life.In death, I discovered Identityis a collection of casual mythsand limited beliefs condemned by limited experiences constrained by timecondemning the truths of possibility,/but that I love the world immortally,I try to look upon the earth as though I’ve liveda hundred years or more, with no conceptionof identity, I put no limits on this second life,For death now holds my body,and death now holds my mind.I know that I am rotting in the ground.My work done — my fate ended.And what I am now is like a ghost,For I am born another fate,Mortal of my body, but not of energy,for that the birds and the worms must one daytaste of each other and my body, I knowThat there is no such thing as mortal energy.Big DeathI crossed the range two years ago,a low man talked me into selling my childrenfor a life time of sweetbread and—they will be fluent in mandarin.“And arabic?” “And english.” i bit my bread,and biting my palm gave each of them my favorite hats.“I will see you in ten years,” i said“When both of you remember who i am,but do not remember what i was like, and iwill not know who you have been.”they each said something to me in Farsi andgave me back my hats. “what did they say i askedthe man, “we will not miss you,” he said they said “youhave already become so thoughtless, and the rivers of your mind are drying up your heart.”Fifty-Seveni wear upon my tongue a leaking sleeveand dogs come to gesture with me;for i have failed to die. ihave not upheld the flag of endless rumination,of the young and ruined nations of the mind and the soul’ssuch disperate revolution, where the strange are fromone another estranged — i do not bidemy time, though perhaps the morning waitsfor me to serve our breakfast — i cannotdispell the very notion that i am in love with water.perhaps entranced by liquid, and dependent on food.I disemboweled the inevitability of any resolution;deeply of my death, the pond’s own tide—deathis not real to me, for in life I love my peace;only when i die, shall i despise serenity.Fifty-Eightneedless to say my children are drownedeach other in the dry red creeks. i havetold them never to drown each other,but they will not listen. there are someleft. if they refuse to stop, i knowat least one will live by the end, andif he is not compelled by the latentsorrow of his ways, or surviving remorsedoes not gays fasten around his heartthat he may sit with me and speakof her crimes without describing inevitabilities,if he or she may see that this wasn’t a game that may begin again with smiles, i hopei will console my only child softly on the landsand not bring her to the water. Fifty-NineAs dropping coins across my clattered belly,i desire the wind to pass between the branches of my skull,but pale the wash of glades unravel,i find i stir my wishes in the oceanand wish my wishes well. but to saythe wind unties my heart? the wind passesnot through my chest, and by the time the airmay reach my heart it is too delicate;of my passion, i require few amenities:i hold that i shall meet another human,one who knows who they are and isnot frightened of how far work may get them.as for the night, i need the moon sometimes,and just thrice, with the moon in my yellow gazeand her warm hand in mine, i knowthe wind will pass through my chest, and revise my heart.Sixtyi gurgle thoughts of leaving death behind;grace is fairly useless in the mind,only through the choices outside a skullcan true love thrive. for grief needs deathnot otherwise. impaneled structures decoratethe inner tiles of my skull, andwhen i die, i rot the paintings with my brain,and the maggots taste the color in my eyes.poor taste to sway the words again this way—of the maggots, i have given them their time.and shaping barlted wheats, andshaping grains to wheat, stale grassesparse the tongue of bearsand bears go very strange to morn.Sixty-Oneit would be too poor to sayhad solitude disheveled my soul.for i find my heart once ravished now ravishingand the days which number my toes,number the future of grief to kill or die,and through my aging peace i murder mourning.death of grace attend no middling praise,that like faceless teeth i allow in mysoul no contorted meddling.for death amaze no true passion,nor death amuse the soul, the mindalone confounds its peacelessness,it is the end of thoughts which curesthe soul and heart, not thedeath itself, for no true soulhas ever been able to die.How do we know this?Because we are alive.Sixty-Twoseeming to never live beyond my means,i divide my heart around inadequacy, andbuy several colored hats for dwarves i payto walk through fishless ponds in front of me.the fish are somewhere else. dying in the trees.“i like the sand,” the water says,“the sand has never bothered me.”the dwarves make comments: “i don’tlike sand, it gets everywhere.” “I agree.”I am offended for the water’s sake, but say nothing.“do not,” one of the dwarves say, “drinkfrom the pond when there are fish inside.”“yes,” i say, and the dwarves attack the water,making sure no fish exist. then, in the posture of dying lionswe take a thirsty sip from off the grass;the dew is not like morning tears,and goes unsalted. the dwarvesgrow very tall and fade into the sun.the fish drop back into the pond.i drink the water, and live beyond my means;i admire the grace of no serenitythat does not hang upon the lip of treason,never taking fear for granted.Sixty-ThreeI am tiring of this quietude, ofthis serility—the shapeless natureof their stifled hearts. Andthough i beckon no atrocities, i gray the thoughts of tempting sorrow,i peel the wings off the deviland look into his eyes, “youare just a boy,” i say, “and thoughyou did not choose such red grease upon yourbrow and body — though you did not choose things tohappen to you, you preserve the hatredof your name by carving into their skins —you pay homage to their life’s atrocitiesby passing down your now chosen pain.Sixty-Fourteal smatterings endure this summer’s dayand must i say that i do miss the cold.it is an awful feeling,until it lulls the soul to sleep.But i do not want to sleep,baling several thousand cats,i look into the woods and cry.it is my birthday, whymust the cats hate me soyet somehow lust againstthe prospect of my kindness,and love me for what i am not.A Poet Without A Notebook Is A Dangerous ThingInside the heart of death I find my soul’strue age. I find my spirit weakand angry in the length of this endurance;i find this solitude attempts to deafen mebut that is why my soul grows stronger,as i find in life my heart so deadly,in death i find my heart unmaimed.the soul’s only limitsare the mind’s imposed restrictions. ThusAmong the white depths of unsolved fears, I surrenderInto a furious passion; for what I oweThis world, it does not owe me.The bison who trod without mystery, through the basset househave had to have his eyes be coveredby the palms of careful lovers, sothat as he walked, he couldn’t know who watched him,he could not know who passed him, or who hemight have seen; so long as they could notfrighten him, they could not be frightened.And so he near too gently tread, and in his heart was stolen believing;For never had he the desire to frighten anyone,But he walked with eyes of lovers, and careful friends’ palms,So by refusing to stir their fears, he let them thinktheir fears were solved, andthus passion was stolen from his heart.But I am not the bison, and in my life I strideInto the white depths of unsolved fears.I taste of no heart or day too gently; for, in order to love, i needn’t be loved in return.Buffalo PoemSeveral smogs of yellow buffalo adore the land,And the children buffalo climb upon their pawish heads to ask“Why is rage permitted in the soul of godAnd not in us?” there is no god,says the mother buffalo, andthe rest is buffalo history.Let Other People Do 3/6/19What Other People DoI need no vindication, for i have livedto live again. Each dark morning is the proof I needin my actions and not my tawny wordsI encapsulate the truth of all my suffering.For who that has palmed my heart, greenwith flescious rotting hands, and calledme a sinner, and tried to make me sin,they have hugged me with too little honesty,And into the valley of the fate of their sins,without atonement they descend, for sins unkemptmay fade the redless soul into the mind,and fade the hell-swept mind into its hard white shell;But I do not forget my hell;I do not devise myself much like a corporation,so I may keep the truth from myself;I do not deny my honest part in the world’s long suffering,Nor shall i dismay the prospect of my responsibility,For those I love I treat, and weather kindly.What my family has done to disprove the truths of love to mehas nothing to do with love for me,and everything to do with their selfishness and failings.Melodies of Buffalowhole fields of men nearing flowers,it is the yellow buffalo who donot see him any different from the grass,and chew upon the moistureof his heart, as though a bitter flower.In greener rains, the fogs ascend,And the buffalos are seen again,Souring the limes upon their thicket teeth,saving the rest unmushed in the bags of their cheeks.I watch as several fellow rains beginto stray from out the eye of the sunand warm upon the backs of yellow buffalo,which drip of lacing ice, and they stir upon the mice,to let the mice be soft and safe inside unwintered cheeks,and storages of warmly pillowed lime.Sixty-Nine 3/1/19Mild feelings all betray my soul, and gesturesGreed the sopping hearts of wet bison,Bound to torture the land beneath but with their mouths.I suddenly cannot aggress the grasses—I suddenly am made solemn by several fugueswhich I believe deserve the homage of solemnity;It is by the recollection of all specific sorrowsThat I appreciate the possibility of joy’s monopoly,wherein only small businesses of sorrowmay only ever eek out brief livings, but never thrive.And though I mind and ‘member the bison, IDo not pass my soul in fear of lessons,I try to look upon the world as though I’ve livedA hundred years or more,So it is the demons in their minds take fright of me,for were they too near my soul, they might burst intoangels.Nor Orchids As A Common Substituteto nag upon the gaieties, the mimesof buffalo reduce the soul to splendor,induce the other souls too tendor,that war might whiten upon their heartswithout the thought of rage beneathremind the herds their style of remorseis all too often greed instead of grief.Some of buffalo eat all the orchards,until there is no more fruitfor the fishes which swim always inside the bellies of the buffalountil they are old enough to swimin ponds more dangerous.Seventy-OneI am tired of living in dispassion,I feel the reigns of my heartmuch dragged behind, i regard the onlyseizures in my heart are mine;I am tired of the days become the nights,I am tired that the winds fall upon my breastAnd that death will not resign—One of the barristers is too tall this evening,He holds his arms very low, And will not trade his burden. I do not wishof death a stronger presence,Just to spend my days with people frightenednot to live.Vicardeeply across my chest i charred theyears collapsed between it. i,like taking casts of sudden ease, departto live in lakes of fallen histories.several foundries of wooden moths unmaim the gladeof orange grasses, pined to make thehills so weak across the land,and chew the solid souls of any strangerswho refuse to pass by, or by again.in sudden rage i grieve within my gazeand cost the loosened hours warm beneath my night;it is all the rage to see the famine dieBeside the eulogies which deafen truer lives,there lie the truer bodies, marinatein winter earth, and when the foundry ope’against ar’ wormy lungs, it is beseechingto betray the grades of bluer agonieswho say so of hearts that live entrench their veins.Ah, but many steely horses lying to eachother once again, want to ride the ride the same:the merry-go-round again. And the plaquewhich collects under the gums of their souls—Many horses look upon the sky and regress,other horses die and live again,but it is a bald prophecy which saysthe lucky rasp of time is dread,and horses dread the moths to nibble their hairand split their ends.Sixty-Fouri take a sorrow on my hipsand, together, blend the skiesto mend black sorrows by reddened thoughtswho streak between the need for grief.but death nor love may cleanse the soul if peaceis not in grief yet grieved to knowpeace may always come again before you leave for death./comes homesWith but a trembling thought i listthe needless crisis in a faithless heart.in some ways, what you want is me to die,and then you’ll have a true excuseto kill yourself and me to blame.thus, for your sake, my mind was filled with false atonementsfor false sins, and for a fake escapemy soul was willing to let my bodydie, but only in my heart i know my death,for of desecration my mind has lied.my integrity has paid a battered price,for with her soul she tried to batter mine,but i have not stepped between my sorrows andendless fate, and i have failed to die,for i have lived to end my fate and save my life,And though but thrice, my soul — of deathhas walked across the stage, i have quietedmy age, and stepped back into the audienceto be with the living, and owe my life again,for i have not believed in that permanencewith the passing of the sun each night,nor the dying of the night each day.Seventy-Three 3/6/19where the rains have dried the ponds, herebeneath my heart i find a grassless valley;i waste myself in the wooden corners of no cabin,somewhere, above the cellar, there is my mistake.i carry no lantern in the night of my heart,it rests in darkness, in all the days of my chest.where have the ponds given into the rain,that is where i prepare my colors,that is where i plant my banana tree.out of the peels i make a blanket, andof the blanket i knit several sweaters:the true uses of fruit are all too new to me,for when i think of God i only think of godless things.in the warm midsections of straw cabins,i chew the butter cultures of my heart, and becausei am alone with the churnings of my fate, i knowmy fate is not to be alone much longer.I No Longer Believe That Honesty Is DifficultBeginning to understand the use of no integrity,I uncover the mythlessness by which we distrust serenity:I no longer believe that honesty is difficult;in your soul i see too many eyes,i look into the sun and find the sky—we’ve sold our soul to godand that is why the devil cries.Tongues and mossets skim their being on my rinde;I am so in love with all the worldoutside the world. the heart is long, and the pages are wide.the words are few, and their ways are many;but there are no wretchid words within this life,only wretchid mouths and wretchid meanings.soft gray laughter, dipping chinsand ugly flowers. i pay the wind to slowitself—the wind pays me to fuck off.i swim in the river but do not drown.i drink the water, but the water leaks out.i’ve lost the skin and the muscle beneath my chin,but without my tongue i think so well.and now, without my body, i seeat best my life before was sweetened hell.Seventy-Five 3/1/19I bless the years which pass between my death,And bless my death hereafter—I know that the bisonHave spoken with my uncle about using knapkins on his pizzaTo dab the orange grease away. My uncleIs very fond of knapkins and pills I believe he would do this—Perhaps later on his heart will forgive himFor all the years he wasted livingwithout the bison, spending too much time with his children,Taking death for granted, and taking life for a fool.I see that he is addicted to eating knapkins.I see that they remind him too much of pizzaAnd making pizza for his children.Perhaps if he takes enough, pills it willbring his children back. perhapsthey’ll come and visit him in the hospital.they will visit him in the hospital,i will call them to let them know.Seventy-Sixi do not care about your brown shoulders,and your gray mind. i do not carethat you’ve decided not to leave the world behind;i am a fool to let you love me in this waybut i cannot remain so wary, i donot bother if your heart betrays mine,but if i let your soul betray my mind,—then arrogance has shortened my sights of life;to misunderstand a day a week, to expecta year to be different is one thing entirely,but it is only a vague distinction that i see betweendeath and life - but the soul and the mind -i fear it is not you i have expected too much from,but the ability of any individual humanity.without enduring community, hopes of one and two may die;without other families, no one family can well survive.And so in this way your soul has betrayed mine,And in my thoughts I have betrayed your life,For, romantic love alone cannot provide,And love itself is not enough to endure this life.Seventy-Sevenwhen i think of god i kiss his chest,the chest is cold, and there are little babies screaming inside.“that is the sound of my heart.” “that isthe sound of your heart?” “i shall neverforget the plagues i have bestowed upon this world.”“that’s bullshit,” i said, “you just putbabies in your chest to impress me.—I bet you don’t even know what mymother did top me last night.” God rolledhis black eyes, “what did she do?”“Exactly,” I said, “you’re a fuckin idiot.”“what did she do?” “she kicked mein the balls and poured warmmacaroni on my bellyand said you did not love me.”ah,” said god, “it’s not that i don’t love youit’s just that i’m incapable of loving“ugh,” i said, “just let the babies outI can’t god said, “their screamingis the only connection i have to you—I don’t love you, and I never will.”Seventy-Eight 3/1/19wherever my son is, pale in the coddled grasses,I will find his body, and bring him homeTo his mother, who’ll try to call his spirit; if I find itI mean to return his body to his soul.I will not do what the others are doingAnd pay for a transplant of such things,Just with his body and his brainI could not believe my son this way.His mother, she is desperateto know where he is or why he went.But more than his body, she wants to see the bloodtrickle back into his face, the grass colorreturn to his freckled eyes. To seehim look at her again, she is willingto pay whatever price, but without his soulto bring his body back to life—I would have to leave them both behind.Seventy-NineI cannot so perfectly dissuade myself from rationsof thoughts which purely rot, and then to think too carefullydo i devise my own persistence in this solemn alphabet andby that orange admittance shall i stay alone,or is it by my recognition that i so dissuade it,and in the paler exorcisms of my patiencediscover a value in the loneliest religionto say that by all reasons of the soul’s slow natureI shall abide my arrogance in order to destroy it,and exaggerate the soul’s sweetnessbecause no aspect of the soul may be exaggerated.Not its hatred, not the waythat love unties the wrath of god.And so I have contributed to my fear’s religion,but I know one morning I shall not.Eightyi cannot shelve my horrors for kindnessand the sake of others; speak to me wretchidly,say of me something unkind and i shall begrateful, for i shall know my way, but sayof me something unkind, untrue, but convincingand i shall let all of your body out of my heart,for you are no lover to speak of me the same;cultured by the hips of breaded sorrow;my soul is not this way. it is not your soulwhich fails you in the patent reason of your hands,or perhaps it is the soul of you which is too peaceful,which steps aside as the world derides your thoughtsas your soul refuses to undress your mind,but, for you i have no patience,for i believe in you more than you do,but i cannot love your needless plight.Eighty-OneI must say in all attempted honesties,my second week of death, I spentall my days laughing! no cackleor evil base instructing my soulor my humors, but I heardsuddenly the pronouncementof the swaying of my previous delusionsthat it had been radically efficient in mythought to think the willows sang—I always thought the treeswere sad, but now I seethey might not’ve been smiling either,just laughing throughout the whole thing.Eighty-Twowhere i cast my patience, i must, ifind, list the fools aloud, but when insteadi choose in patience to cast the fool myself,some androgyny dissipates my predilictionto understand my pain and plight as narrative,for when i undress my body from my soul, my mindfalls pale into an ocean which doesn’t believein land; there is no identity to pain,pain is like joy, and joy is like the ocean;so when again i find in isolate’s conceptionthe stalwart confusion that there is a life which should be lived,i undress my soul again and drip long sugarvaguely on my mind to sweeten breath’s significance,so may i see again the fool i amto think that I am any character at all,so when i look upon the ocean of the world,i do not waste my bitter patience on foolish lists;patiently, i see no fools at all.Eighty-Threethrough my chesti let the devil passto rest awhileand forgive himself.For Bitter Rains To Sweeten All Our SinsI make a tonic of my heart’s conviction,i leak into such bottles, and sip them all the time.i hold of my pockets full of grain,and when i think of love,i redden all the nights.that bitter rains can sweeten all our sins,and send our vicious god to hell, i knowmy body does not contain my soul.my soul, far beyond these days andskin it tastes like yours a summer’s well,and winter cellars crave my warmth,but i am not like time, humming through the seasons;i look into the sun and see the sky,i watch my health — i escape my poems,I live my life with growing stealth,and off my soul like patient wartsi look to burn my sins in living hell,but keep my rage, for with my ragei mean to melt the cellars hope.Eighty-FiveFor craving another soul to share within my body,i crease my soul so as not to burst the casket;I know there may be souls who crave a different vessel,so leave yours to another — i have room in mine.Eighty-SixIn taking several baths, I wash my feet away—How will I go to see my fatherAnd tell him I will not be able to walk him down the aisle.What will I say to the policeWhen I show up to their houseswith no tostitos? I go intobuy raisins, and buy my supper instead;the po-boy is standing where the groceries are, he isVery sad about larchmont, and the whole world,The way the whole world sees him; arethe winds grown satin ‘cross the grasses?and the stomachs of praising horsesdo not remit so many sins as this?with grace, i retard my suffering, forthe soul is always older than the skin.Wearing rotten apples on my shoulders,i look into the sky and like to pretendmy heart is not so blessed by all the wind.Eighty-SevenThus, embezzling my love within their sins, they triedto assure me, to make me convinced,that much of my love was their encouragementfor doing what they did the way they did.but i recall their economies sofraudulent, in their apologiesi only recognize new sin.Eighty-EightAdmonishing the wind,I passed through several valleys, pressingMy forehead upon the dirt of my child’s grave;you should not, i whisper, have eaten so much candy,if you had eaten less candyperhaps you would not have had that stomachache.There Goes The Hour, Prone To Fail All MythsAnd Strengthen All The Contradictions Of Integritywhen gray waters pass around my heart,i hide my body in the mouths of seals;what pain i feel, i do not feel.but the seals are not so lovely, they makejokes of my body—they enlist the beavers;the beavers look toward my spine.i always thought that the worms would taste my skins,but now i see i shall know more teeth.Ah, should ever i have trusted anyone?Perhaps trust itself should not be trustedand then i would hold no violent feeling,for i would never be loved again.for the thoughts which mimic reason,i have no cure but the entranceto the palace of suspicion,which, if paranoia might desistwill turn-in to be gracious action.for those values, dearlywhich mimic the soul’s delight,hearts may only be so tender,if they are trying not to die.i bathe my heart in endless limeand poison my soul with the cure of rhyme;There is all to be said, andlittle to be lived, there islittle worth saying, and too much worth livingto live in any one’s one life;so in my deadly respect and fashionable rebellion,i bathe my chest in greenish rhyme,and cry into your eyes,so when you see the day you areand aren’t ashamed, but either way,you cannot stay inside. so i go, and bathe in the moon’s green waters,and i see that i cannot see very muchwith my eyes, with my mind i seea little more, and with my hearti may one day see it all, but with our soulswe may see it all at the same time.Ninetyi put lemons back together, ifill the juice back into lime—the zesti collect in my hat, i bleachmy hair for free. And when I seeyou, I sell to the yellow marketsbut cannot buy you flowers, for youare not with me. my hairi sell to the children—hairis in fashion these days. i am nota saint—i sell my hair for lemonade.the children no longer know to makeit themselves not even minute-made.even toddlers need permits these days.Ah, i look upon the bricks and do not seeyour face—i bleach my beard for you,—ah, the children are more than lost,they no longer care about these things.perhaps they are not children anymore—let’s just go into the forest and project upon the treesAnd least send me a poem, on yellow paperand tell me of your ways.Second Elegy To Death It is not my heart which stills the birth of treason,Nor my mind which ruins the worth of hatred.It is not my soul who frightens death,Nor my body that shall leave the earth to rest.Many yellow grapes have popped within my pocket;My tongue widens, the wind begins to stretch;I think my leg will be sticky for a very long time. It is not lifeitself which decorates the other worlds.It is not time which cautions me from grieving too long.It is not to language that I commit myself,Nor towards humanity do I sacrifice my love.I do not look into your eyes and see your soul;No one has even seen a soul at all.It’s not as though the deeds I grieve Are always grievous deeds: I do not visitThe bars, I cannot find one without a TV.I can feel my chest, the dirt now churns behind my ribs,The sky grows older, destroying its reputation;the sunset begins to lower all expectations.It is not that I love music, nor care for children.I have given up poetry already;Words have left me very far behind.I do not visit my family, they have been unkind to me;I do not like grapes, and yet I find them in my pockets.The earth begins to stutter, my mind is not so nice to me.I do not starve myself so I may understand the poor,I do not drink so I may understand all thirst.It is not that I am a child, that I have too many memories, but have not lived at all.In the next ten years or so, I’ll find a lover.Hopefully a poet, hopefully not a poet.I love the world too often, perhaps too rarely.The fish tend to my grapes, the birds tend to the fish,but the wind can never last to shape the trees.I do not understand myself in the eyes of animals.I do not think of you, I do not think of love.I’m not a poet, I’m not even human;I shall not last as either, nor as both.I look into the sun and cannot see its color;Perhaps I do not need a soul. ————————————————————Yet, When burning souls are not enough to brighten mine,I do not trust the way today i see this life.it would be in my heart to shame the land—deeply of my death, i cannot speakof my heart anymore, i cannot own this heart alone;My mind depreciates the value of my chest in sorrow,i would say that i have placed my soul inwards,i have given up too much of what i am,i have become the work, and so unless you’veread my soul in words, all of me willseem like nothing to you to me. for Iwould not shed my grace, i wouldnot shed my grace for love, but i cannot keep this heart to myself any longer. some apples, i pass along to my mother,she does not frighten me. in the windsi find my pale ways lasting, and in the morningi sell my monies to the sheep.to the land, i give my body,but my body is nothing to receive.my tale, i tattle, but no one cares repeat.I douse my heart in reason, but cannot hold the lease.My soul is like a sack of rats, alwaysDesiring some several different companies.What this solitude continues to do to me ishard not to repeat. my heart is growing softer,but my chest is like the windless wheats.And if i could let someone walk through the fields of my body,i could let them sing, but never speak;if this is what a poet is,then it’s not what i’d like to be.But I could pass my heart through reddened groves;I shall romanticize, perhaps dehumanize this solitude.I shall live till this becomes a lovely memory.And I may take a deep breath, that youare not afraid of me. life and deathare very long. i have never everput pressure on myself, i havesimply lived in this world.but i have not loved well enough.i have lived too often through my heartand so i have not shared it.for no one i’ve met who lives in society may sustain this,it has nearly killed me several dozen times.And if this, and solitude, are what it costs to be a poet,Then being a poet is not very human,And I’d rather be human after all.Thus, may the touching of my chest condemn no hand,May no hand blacken as i kiss it, may no lipscrack and bleed as they stick upon my cheek.I feel I have seen the world and become blindagain too many times for my young life but ihave not forgotten all my revelations,I simply have had a tough time sharing them,but all I’ve learned of lovecannot replace it,for if I cannot share my lifeI cannot live.Yet, may no heart be dredged through any lips or ink as thoughA tainted soul could purify itself through words alone.Yes, I have seen the lands become the wind,but you have seen the same.Let us no longer be alone,it has tried so longto dehumanize our patient souls,but a soul which grows too patient,is no soul at all. i am no moremy body than my words, but my lovewas never meant for words alone.So I am passionate among my sickness,And I begin to tire my disease;I look into the sun, it’s color I cannot see,but if that sun is the same each day you seethen I know I need my soul,and need it gladly, far beyond all death and poetry.Ninety-TwoHow fret sharp winds no strings of light;May not the souls display a loose despair.I find the sunken hatredsHate themselves and one who lovesMay live beneath the grassesWithout God’s help. Open sands (may)Dress of my (across) chest a new-found glass;I look into the sun, and magnify my breast—I mean each day to pass as though a yearWe’ve gained in strength and wisdom,But tell me of the women,The men who ate, and eat the grass,For no suffering into history has passedAs though a modern poverty, but shiver not my smile;Look past my painful thoughts, and do not thinkMe strange to write of you:I draft no cage around my palm, nor pourSome moat around my loosened soul for all these woundsHave not become my heart.