"Poem Convincing You to Leave Your Wife."
"Hey you, you of unbuttoned flannel shirt and untold charm,
if you hear her, that Rosenberg has had painted a new painting,
the wisest thing to do is to be dropped--
to drop everything you are doing and manage
one way or another to see it.
No, have you dare you seen seen it?
As I was going to St. Ives, I met a man with seven wives.
Every wife had seven faults.
Every fault had seven bolts.
Every bolt had seven tries.
Bolts, faults, tries, wives, how many are going to save lives?
Duck is duck and fuck is I'm afraid, fuck.
It is you that I miss, that I want.
I espouse that you come here and miss me too now,
now as in how much to do between now and 6:00.
Where or where on this moonlit and dream visited planet
are you?
Are you willing?
Are you well?
Are you sick?
I'm sick of love, nar, nar.
This is just to say lover, it's over and it's not.
Oh, Lizzie dearest, here's letter within letter.
I have met with your old flame and become unsettled about I,
me, mine, mien, meow.
Who is to blame?
He thinks of you monthly and would like
to meet and fuck biannually.
He has had a vasectomy and sex with other men.
Are you game?
Funny what we harbor when we do, and where,
and how, how long, how low, below, below.
But an excellent driver stoned, I
have decided that we do not want other people's wives
as husbands as we do not want our own,
as we do not want our own.
I cannot live with you because that would be, is life.
Oh, Liz, twix impunity and impurity lie I and lies my art,
so I will do as I am told, love your neighbor as yourself,
put your cup upon the shelf as the kindly sexton
for some kinky sex on the slide, and on the slide, on the fence,
if you're brave enough to try.
For listen up, no concrete test of what is really true
has ever been agreed upon.
For some make the criteria--
the criterion external to the moment of perception,
putting it either in Revelation, the consensus gentium,
the instinct of the heart, aye, there's
the rub, or systematized experience of the race,
three men in a tub.
Others make the perceptive moment its own test.
Use common sense.
A la reid.
Use synthetic judgment.
A priori.
Kant not cunt.
The unsuitability of the opposite,
but I was never into that.
The capacity to be fit-- be verified by sense.
Now, now, now that, the possession
of complete organic unity or self-relation,
realize when a thing is its own other.
Oh, brother, I long to be realized like that.
Back to you.
Will you come and realize me?
Would you?
Could you be my other now and for a short time
like between 6:00 and 9:00, 9:00 and 6:00?
We may have acquired it by fair means or by foul.
Passion may have whispered it or accident suggested it.
But if the total drift of thinking
continues to confirm it, that is what she, he, we means by true.
I renamed it and it remained and I
remain yours, the wife that strayed
and the wife that lefted, oh.
Skirts, traps, wraps, thighs, we had stayed up
all night, my friends and I. Sing,
sing, leave gotta, leave your husband, leave your wife.
But Augie, not you, you do not ever leave
your dear old twisted mama.
For if we leave, it is is for now,
forever, you will remain cult and I poor I lost cunt.
Yours, love, oh.
Yours so.
Oh, to make the air turn glue and rubber.
Science says what exists.
It's like a list.
But to compare the words of both what exists and what does not,
what thou wast and what thou art,
we must consult not science, but what Pascal
calls ya our le lay mine, my old lazy heart."
And then there's a little French thing that I refuse to read.
And then in parentheses it says, "(shut up),
my heart is cool and blank, is fool and black.
Nevertheless, nevertheless, I remain the wife that stayed
and the wife that left, the wife that laughed,
and the wife that slayed.
Riffs, miffs, thoughts, knives, what exists
and what alas does not, what I wast and what I art not.
Word is and word was unheard of.
Rauschenberg has painted a new painting.
I dare not.
Meet me there, go."
Well, when I was concocting this little exercise,
I never got to step 2, what is actually the difference,
but I can tell you right now the first ones are
a lot easier to read.
[LAUGHTER]