Just Enough Light to Live in the Eye, Thank You

Then too when yesterday arrives

And I look especially shitty in the mirror

Shaving and mad at my performance

In last night’s nightmare recently ended

Saying to my face why didn't you

Pocket those magic emeralds 

You Goddamned fool and I keep

Trying to remember something then

When afternoon later appears

Swaying loosely in the dining room

Like an alcoholic Christmas tree

That’s when I recall I dreamed you

Wielding the violent violin of desire

And playing the holy fuck out of it

Dancing with Wind-Broken Birds

As if exactly the only way all this

Inexorably somehow moves us

Somehow tumbles us like torn leaves

Skittering into wet winter drifts

O tree-eager night play windy chords

For us wear out your lousy instruments

You don’t know you don’t know what

Music should do for such lovers as we

Who palmed church pennies

We who wheedled from God’s hand

Three sacred days alone together

We who care nothing for fragrant spring

A flagrant landscape gaudy with lust

A bawdy horizon fallen into itself and lost

We Who Speak with Inflections of Desire

And so many of us forget ourselves

We forget at any given time nearly

All our beliefs remain hidden waiting

To become explicit in our judgments 

In our assents in our avowals that

Something should be such and such  

So many of us forget that it is we

Who are the great forgetters that

We mastered lucidly this art and thus
Banished ourselves to vast and strange

Domains these frontiers of illimitable pity

Where yellow cities rise in yellow deserts

Where we see horror in white sunsets and

Moonless dawns light our tepid dreams