Ode to Women

Poets, rush the last lines
Of your odes to women:
There are strangers on the street
Who won’t rip you apart.
Leaves kiss whispered dewdrops
Unrealized in the wilderness,
And dogs whine waiting to be loved.
Women arrive to introduce diseases
And then dangle the cure—
Those missing pages,
Those beautiful vultures.
There have been men, honest,
Who looked at that door
And refused to enter, preferring
To protest the mad instinct,
To burn like Buddhist monks
In the fire of the unwanted desire,
Laughing in the flames.
So christen this crisis the last;
Bells toll the tide’s approach,
And your clocks are out on the sand.

Alone

Door by door, you're passing me by, laughing and crying into ears that aren't listening; and I'm sitting inside, all alone.
Because you could open me up. Yes, it takes depth of character and years' experience to get it down right; we're all drunk on our own insecurities, howling in pain underneath pristine exteriors, crawling around amid the shambles of our feelings searching for something to sell to a consumer economy. But just stop a minute, and listen carefully: I'm here to meet you, as torn-up by the world as the world is by itself; I'm standing just on the other side, waiting for the slightest insinuation, a faint falter from the heights of your indifference—a slip of the censor, a prick of the hidden tenderness. Knock, friend, ever so quietly; place your palm on the knob, and I'll let you in.
God, how it hurts to see the world place you back on the rack. Society’s education is to learn to see oneself through the eyes of others, who have been taught the same thing. And the murderous insight of the unschooled is the realization of the system’s insistence on mandating who you are and then condemning you for it.
Where does all this come from? Hurt feelings, naturally. I don’t know if I’ve ever been slightly understood by anyone (I really don’t), but today the person who I had imagined as catching a scent of my simmering essence, who caught a glimmer of my movement in his periphery, and for whom I had crumpled up so many lonely hopes—today that person refused to see me as I actually am. Some stranger said something that alerted him to a coincidence, a condemned eccentricity in my character—and I watched from the ground as he went flying around the corner, having tripped over my wasted faith as he ran. Held his breath, afraid of the quarantine. I watched the curtain fall over his eyes.
The world is a vampire, ain’t that the damned truth. And I sigh as I hear the heckling of those who love me unconditionally, enraged at the use of a dirty word.

Note

Here’s the deal: when I tap my foot on the ash-stained cement, you be the butterfly mounting invisible treble clefs to the conduction of city sirens. That’s it, and that’s all. The people passing in cars being beaten apart by over-amplified basses can watch as we re-create musical theory; I don’t want anything but the simplicity of this streetlamp’s warm territory.
Forget the tangled knots you stuffed into your pockets to deal with later; let’s not gift existence to these trivialities by holding solemn conferences over them. Let them rot on the agenda.
Conversely, let the future die in the fictional distance. I’m sick of committing. Horizons lie, anyway. We’re orbiting reality, love; let’s slow down to the terrestrial tug.
So here we go: the street expects, the finger finds, and the interrupted transitive implies impatience. The decrepit conductor turns, straightening his coattail and running a cool hand over his pallid pate; lips are licked and pressed to polished mouthpieces in romantic preparation; and eyes straining under the weight of disdainful brows search out the source as my whispered joke reaches the punch line, and your hand flutters up to contain a muffled chuckle.