AlGEBRA Read the problem
carefully—several times if necessary; that is, until you understand
the problem, know what is to be found, and know what is given. Decision time again, conscience mocks. I caress pointed bones, shivering skin, all pits, rough edges and hard age. The dishes chronicle his passing as they pile and ferment in the sink, but ripe steam still surfaces from our dirty clothes. Let
one of the unknown quantities be represented
by a variable, this is an
important step and must be done carefully.
A frail hunch descends along the cracked corners of my mouth. I miss drinking; somehow spirit and mouth alike became aerobic, my apprehensions, fixed distinctly elsewhere. If appropriate, draw figures or
diagrams and label known and unknown parts; look
for formulas containing the known quantities and the unknown quantities. Conscience persists: Structure, or life? You decide. Will you dress today, and what of the mailbox? Have you visited it recently? Where hides the rent? What happened to your lover? Do something, would you? says conscience, hungry. Form an equation relating the
unknown quantities to the known quantities. I grab a bottle, his picture a rocks glass, two straws, two ice cubes, a lemon wedge. I scratch the smile from his eyes like the fake foil from a lottery card. One tight-lipped swallow, and I begin to dance. I slice the curtains in pirouette, drop-kick the alarm, choke his cat, poke holes in his favorite chair with a screwdriver. Check and interpret all
solutions in terms of the original problem—not just the
equation—since a mistake may have been made in setting up the equation. I set out walking, hoping to find him, by chance, in the liquor store.
ANOTHER NIGHT ALONE along the boulevard there aren’t any dreams cars rush like surf but they’re only cars people walk by but they don’t look up I watch from the table on the balcony feet on the chair with a glass of beer maybe music trying to gather meter from the rush of new rubber on concrete the engines tight movings the pure air and for a single moment the street grows quiet and I know the world stretches along the neck along the shoulderblades there are ears out there
IF WISHES WERE POEMS And I had one wish it would be that I am given a new mind, and I do not remember what yesterday does or last or the year before last year. And in forgetting, that uncontrollable peace reigned in tyranny over me, and daylight held real delight in repeated random acts of old fashioned concentration, and there are no vacancies yet I am fashionably empty. And that anything, anything is easy. And that indulgence is prudence because then has already been, now is rich and later has left for the day.
LOVE IS NO TOMATO If only love made the thundering clap and whine of a balloon deflating when it went. Maybe then I’d know. Instead, it forgets. It forgets sweet discovery and falls victim to memory. It forgets how deft fingers glide through hair, how an eye can mean so much. One step after the next, love forgets It quits talking about itself; it rolls on its ribs and forgets to say goodnight. It glances through foreheads and over shoulders or below. It smiles somewhere else at something blurred and untouchable. If only love’s rot left a tangible soft spot, a visible bruise that I could squeeze, like a tomato, and know. Maybe then I wouldn’t be so confused. But its weariness grows like a cavity, or age— mute pain at first. It forgets the feeling of a warm hand resting on the back of the neck, a tracing of the navel, a kiss on the eyelids it forgets. It forgets its own promises and soon soft Iloveyous conflate, and ambitious musings convert to mere echolalia Soon again, nothing-at-all said, and even worse, nothing meant. Then it forgets its own face for lack of looking, and what it is becomes what it was and what it used to be, and Love is nowhere to be found.
THE DEVIL’S CIGAR
Do come to love what needs no monument and is not new: same clock buzz to compel you to wake same house of broken crayons same mugajoe, same cigarette break, same sad complaints, the same mistakes; same dollars leant or lost or spent to get you through. Oh this is what you all thought was important. Do come to love the key of G: be G and G and G, and G—go slow, when the wind rushes on like a piccolo— if that is enough for you to belong, to go along if not get along. If not in action I am sorry in thought it has come to this. Do come to accept birth as an accident, death as universal apathy, the soul as inept beyond perception and conscience, the past as something the memory must mute to ease complexity, and the future as little more than a settled commitment to this or that brand of laundry detergent. And then come back to me.
WE TWO I’ll be the one with all the theory; you, you gather a rhythm about you. The world is palpable and infinite between us. I’ll think transactions, numbers, formulas. One plus one. I’ll request from you, what is the answer? I’ll believe in logic, deductions undressed. You’ll bargain a rhyme, toss me a whimpering sound: the capricious word, an emotional scrabble, hoping to be heard. I’ll promise knit knots. I’ll hand you closed, one- dimensional non- intersecting curves: incalculable three-dimensional spaces.
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