January 28, we were going to have sex in the stacks.
We were in the 800s standing eagerly
amid the old copies of the Romantics,
looking at the thick dark blue spine of Wordsworth's Collected.
I thought had the strength of his knee
to fully express his unplaced social being in sentences
had produced publicly verifiable beauty.
So that his subsequent civic requirements
seem to have depth enough for him to become poet laureate.
And how his later leaden writing upheld that intensity
and verifiability only instead of searching
wind, and rocks, and retina for the sentences
of his social being.
He chirped his confirmed lofty perch to other social beings
in lengthy claustrophobic hallelujah
for the present second.
There are devices for holding it still long enough
and he had learned them rhyme was a burden
crime was unambiguously explainable wrong,
time had snuck around behind him.
He had carved his own anxiety into a throne
and now he was stuck on it constantly
remembering sadder days when he had wanted
to be happy with a purity that made him blink,
thinking about it from his frozen vantage.
He couldn't bear to look at his past,
he thought of it as unbearably edenic.
Our own more slippery contrapuntal
hallelujah as we're planted in the immediate future, only
a few buttons zippers and a little elastic down the road.
We had first snuck into the men's room,
but it had been crowded with two intensely separate urinals.
As we turn to hurry out, you pointed
at some of the big magic marker graffiti on the beige tiles.
"This place needs a woman's touch"
was answered by "Finger my asshole, cunt,"
which then had been modified by an arrow indicating that cunt
was to be moved in front of asshole: "Finger my cunt
asshole."
We were eager to prove syntax was not mere vanity
and that bodies could use it to resist
the tyranny of elemental words.
And wouldn't it be nice to get knowledge and pleasure
on the same page, so we'd hurried out
to the deserted 800s.