This is called "Welcome Fear."
For one thing, I am glad the goal of enlightenment
means being stupid enough to slip out the door each morning
and live.
With no second guessing, no poses, just
this leaning and slouching the experts term hope.
So people like me cannot be held guilty.
In our travels, we'd never laugh at the passing streets.
We're not like those grins they have plastered
to the sides of every bus.
But what do I do?
What am I supposed to do when I want someone to hold me?
How easy it is and inevitable and paramount and sweet
to recall how you would dress before the mirror
in those minutes before a blouse started to button itself on,
when sunlight from the window might rest briefly on your back.
And I begin by tipping my mouth to your skin the way
the first imagined oar dipped into an unimaginable sea.
Now, nothing seems right.
Between us, everything either finished or unfinishable.
Whatever I once wrote to you fills me,
torn into many small pieces.
Sometimes, it seems as if that mirror
I mentioned has been lost, perhaps stolen by men
I'd hired myself mistakenly.
I am my own bad influence.
Many things have gone wrong.
And I will never be what you wished me to be.
You will always lean toward the mirror, putting on lipstick,
kissing the air.
But since the mirror has been revoked,
the kiss collects in the shape of space,
attempting to kiss itself.
Well, the tragic can go fuck itself.
Even if once in the middle of the night,
I woke because a smoke detector went off,
signaling its batteries were dying.
Even if it's like that, fear like that.
Walking naked through a cold house.
Moving from alarm to alarm unable to find the right one,
even if it's like that.