This poem takes as its title the name of a now defunct rock
group in San Francisco.
It's in sections that have little black dots between them,
and I'll just pause in between the sections.
"Romeo Void."
I ask her, it's supposed to be an easy answer, will you stay?
And the pale overnight, there's no difference between our first
and last day together, soon we'll tell each other so.
We untapped in what I call my bed,
although I've never slept in it, already light and sound.
Mostly I'm healthy and I run, and what if I only
find moonlight?
Insane for a year, and never even looked it up
to see what it meant.
Months listening, as the waves determined to be in motion
and not weeping.
I don't know if I save a moth or kill it,
lifting it from the water.
I go like a satellite, so close I can almost
say what you mean to me.
How else but in another's arms?
Are you thinking of me by the river, as I begin again?
Near is the light with my back to it.
His idea of fun was belting his wife.
I'm telling this to my friend and her husband,
about a total loser I overheard in a restaurant.
I have never married, and have no taste for it.
This body that I'm in this time, I
love you and only accept death from the inside like a woman,
like music, just outside what I can imagine.
This has been written by a different person.
This is better written by a different person.
As in Poland, my grandfather, a young man
makes a decision to leave his country like someone
biting a man's nipple.
And forces me over here like a bed, shoved from the wall
with one leg.
Marigolds, eyebright, rye, saffron,
goldenrod, permission to write about anything
and mention any place.
The extremes of ordinary, where betrayal doesn't exist.
Depending on the way that you feel, you live.
Each difficulty so close to dream.
You are more beautiful than human to me sometimes.
God forgive me, everything seems pretty good, all right.
I'll have to return with a sprig of lilac, but I'll be back.
I'll have to return with white blossoms, I'm gone.
I've left shore as I left childhood like a bed
shoved from the wall with one leg,
for hot humid days and humid nights,
wondering whether I'm to have children.
Disregarding how a person gets antsy,
and then desperate for the internal life.
So does it me, so I'm not you, all right, all right.
How quickly the little wooden flute fills with my heat,
blowing across it, the black ink that
spells out the latest rage, an art out of a list of things
loved.
I have to return without wondering how others do it.
I have to return without carrying rain to a desert.
I have to return without wondering about the family
name, the half light of sleep on the apples in Poland.
The electrical short in the heart, as the rain lets up,
the slightest birds set off in the air.
Tide, fog, white decks, gulls, as you
can see from your window.
I move by the line, moral imperatives are physical.
You on a train, eating someone else's food.
Is it all right?
I'm taking so long to leave you.
Happy in myself without gender, forced to move on memory,
I love you.
Even if it's left over from some dirge,
the planets drifting like albumen.
I'm delighted this time not thinking about being
one with the universe.
I didn't even notice I had bent and mended it.
This body that I'm in this time, I
love you as a beautiful woman.
Even as a man might think of me by the river,
I'll think of you by the sea.
Eternal morning from La Fiesta Hotel, three or four Mexicans
blurt out a fight below.
I remember you showing silver with your teeth,
and now it is summer in December.
Like a soul coming from the shower, headless, a towel
around its waist.
I don't really have to wear this lipstick,
but to prove I'm alive I like the color.
A maid waits on me in some skewed reality,
and I ask myself how I'm going to think.
This was my belief, to oppose something solid on the basis
of night, on the basis of fog.
Now in the distance, my attention
is broken off like a bus horn.
Like every hour I have to die, for fear I will lose you.
You know the feeling, it comes to you eventually, to you.
Mass that has no friend, months that punishes Earth.
Oh, why are you weeping?
Oh, why are you unfortunately in the world?
Unfortunately in the world, pain is the weapon everyone gets.
Missing the northern migration, no excuses please.
[AUDIO OUT] Things we carry to their extreme will meet again.
The senses may be elevated to sacred, why live in principle
and die in facts?
Clinging in English, on the roof of mother's land,
on the basis of night to prove you're alive.