grammatolatry

If time were tellable, we wouldn’t keep asking.
Our faces would stop turning to face
the faceless face.

Enough with the hands meeting twice a day.
Enough of expecting change
at the same hour.

I f a table bears many weights of items,
the items also depress the upforce
of the table.

The notebook is equally ruined
by the lost wine. The table
is a platform on which to lose.

Surface has no depth but all depth
has this surface. Not on purpose.
So math, not metaphor, works.

I can’t charm it open, so charm
is dropped: if’t’weren’t love,
then love weren’t it. Two Ls arranged

as a square keep love outside the frame.
When I came, I was half-coming.
You left, half-leaving. A formula.

It’s so even-steven, yet so fractal
and mobius. Yet hagborn. Yet digital.
Calculation is such subtraction,

always figuring what’s under
what’s under, to break the surface
of the negative realm down

where the wheels don’t skid.
Where they may or may not skid.
Where we don’t know.

Where we look at signs, like Five of Cups,
a sign of a set of four cups inside
one big cup, which is a drain

which is why you are weak.
Sourced. Circled protractorlike,
found will be our clock lock,

our night watch, our clear sign.
It’s an invisible bend
in the lightsticks, it’s a prophecy.

so I have no problem telling you
why you cried over the third lost
metal or the mousetrap. I knew
that orgasms weren’t your fault
and that feeling of keeping solid
in yourself but wanting an ecstatic
black hole was just bad beauty.

Certain loves were perfect
in the daytime and had every
right to express carnally behind
the copy machine and there are
no hard feelings for the boozy
sodomy and sorry XX daisy chain,
whenever it felt right for you.

And when the moment of soft
levitation with erasing hands
made you feel dirty, like
the main person to think up love
in the first place, I knew that.
It’s okay, you’re an innocent
with the brilliance of an animal

stuffing yourself sick on a kill.
Don’t, don’t feel like the runt alien
on my ship: I get you. I know
the dimensions of your wishing
and losing and don’t think you
a glutton with petty beefs. But
even I, who know your triggers,

your emblematic sacs of sad fury,
I understand why the farthest fat trees
sliver down with your disappointment
and why the big sense of the world,
wrong before you, shrugs but
somewhere grasps your spinning,
stunning, alone. But you have me.

Other weddings are so shrewd on the sofa, short
and baffled, bassett-legged. All things

knuckled, I have no winter left, in my sore rememory,
to melt down for drinking water. Shrunk down.

Your wedding slides the way wiry dark hairs do, down
a swimming pool drain. So I am drained.

Sincerely. I wish you every chapped bird on this
pilgrimage to hold your hem up from the dust.

Dust is plural: infinite dust. I will sink in the sun,
I will crawl towards the heavy drawing

and design the curtains in the room
of never marrying you. Because it is a sinking,

because today’s perfect weather is a later life’s
smut. This soiled future unplans love.

I keep unplanning the same Sunday. Leg
and flower, breeze and terrier, I have no garden

and couldn’t be happier. Please, don’t lose me
here. I am sorry my clutch is all

tendon and no discipline: the heart is a severed
kind of muscle and alone.

I can hear yours in your room. I hear mine
in another room. In another’s.

Let’s ask a poet with no way of knowing.
Someone who can give us an answer,
another duplicity to help double the world.

What kind of poetry is all question, anyway?
Each question leads to an iceburn,
a snownova, a single bed spinning in space.

Poet, Decide! I am lonely with questions.
What is snow? What isn’t?
Do you see how it is for me.

Melt yourself to make yourself more clear
for the next observer.
I could barely see you anyway.

A blizzard I understand better,
the secrets of many revealed as one,
becoming another on my only head.

It’s true that snow takes on gold from sunset
and red from rearlights. But that’s occasional.
What is constant is white,

or is that only sight, a reflection of eyewhites
and light? Because snow reflects only itself,
self upon self upon self,

is a blanket used for smothering, for sleeping.
For not seeing the naked, flawed body.
Concealing it from the lover curious, ever curious!

Who won’t stop looking.
White for privacy.
Millions of privacies to bless us with snow.

Don’t we melt it?
Aren’t we human dark with sugar hot to melt it?
Anyway, the question—

if a dream is a construction then what
is not a construction? If a bank of snow
is an obstruction, then what is not a bank of snow?

A winter vault of valuable crystals
convertible for use only by a zen
sun laughing at us.

Oh Materialists! Thinking matter matters.
If we dream of snow, of banks and blankets
to keep our treasure safe forever,

what world is made, that made us that we keep
making and making to replace the dreaming at last.
To stop the terrible dreaming.

You love a woman and you wonder where she goes all night in some tricked-
out taxicab, with her high heels and her corset and her big, fat mouth.

You love how she only wears her glasses with you, how thick
and cow-eyed she swears it’s only ever you she wants to see.

You love her, you want her very ugly. If she is lovely big, you want her
scrawny. If she is perfect lithe, you want her ballooned, a cosmonaut.

How not to love her, her bouillabaisse, her orangina. When you took her
to the doctor the doctor said, “Wow, look at that!” and you were proud,

you asshole, you love and that’s how you are in love. Any expert, observing
human bodies, can see how she’s exceptional, how she ruins us all.

But you really love this woman, how come no one can see this? Everyone must
become suddenly very clumsy at recognizing beauty if you are to keep her.

You don’t want to lose anything, at all, ever. You want her sex depilated, you
want everyone else not blind, but perhaps paralyzed, from the eyes down.

You wonder where she goes all night. If she leaves you, you will know
everything about love. If she’s leaving you now, you already know it.

Oh, to be ready for it, unfucked, ever-fucked.
To have only one critical eye that never
divides a flaw from its lesson.

To play without shame. To be a woman
who feels only the pleasure of being used
and who reanimates the user’s

anguished release in a land
for the future to relish, to buy
new tights for, to parade in fishboats.

To scare up hope without fear of hope,
not holding the hole, I will catch
the superbullet in my throat

and feel its astounding force
with admiration. Absorbing its kind
of glory. I must be someone

with very short arms to have lost you,
to be checking the windows
of the pawnshop renting space in my head,

which pounds with all the clarity
of a policeman on my southernmost door.
To wish and not jinx it: to wish

and not fish for it: to wish and forget it.
To ratchet myself up with hot liquid
and find a true surprise.

Prowling the living room for the lightning,
just one more shock,
to bring my slow purity back.

To miss you without being so damn cold
all the time. To hold you without dying otherwise.
To die without losing death as an alternative.

To explode with flesh, without collapse.
To feel sick in my skeleton, in all the serious
confetti of my cells, and know why.

Loving you has made me so scandalously
beautiful. To give myself to everyone but you.
To luck out of you. To make any other mistake.