So where do you end up when your eyes are finally working so well you can hardly see in front of you instead you look inside out you feel the acid in your brain working through to the page as pitiless as economists adding up zeros you live in this world it opens its arms exactly what you feared it is worse than your dreams shutting your eyes to find the tortured boy printed on your retina the hole in his cheek the slashed arms bloodless now the cigarette burns how did they and the big stupid money fracking the laws of mercy all the connections obvious and obscene and still you dream of linoleum in kitchens that years have demolished into hygienic visions mothers in aprons squawking for decades of migraines and butter or bending over shining ovens in their Good Housekeeping skirts their hair in scarves their perfectly polished children executive husbands televisions you murdered them all you stood in high heels and vomited blood better than madness your sister’s eyes turned in to policemen coming to slash her to ribbons her visions of Lear her naked pain poetry you never saved me but there was the rail of words that promised a fake redemption you knew it was fake but out of the dream stepped those ample summers as real as the camellias opening outside your window red as your fingers red as your newborn babies beautiful vaginas speaking the possible here in this same world where chemical nightmares scour the skin from children o poetry who stepped down and clapped her manacles speaking her legislations knowing the sentence is life its fluid chains its solitary rooms its knives of ice and blood opening inside you like forgiveness you think of your mother’s will where she ministers justice your sisters and you laid out in columns neat and shy and obedient scrub the skirtings weed the roses death will visit at last and run his finger along the shelves and find us wanting but he can go to hell him and his little brothers all those feminine lessons I flung on the fire of my ego refusing death although I invited him in with every word every cigarette every failure poetry you never lied to me
Saturday, December 3, 2011
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"I drink to our ruined house,
to all of life's evils too,
to our mutual loneliness,
and I, I drink to you -
to eyes, dead and cold,
to lips, lying and treacherous,
to the age, coarse, and cruel,
to the fact that God has not saved us."
-- Anna Akhmatova
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