poem: small chronicle of living in my head

silent, silent girls

play at depression, play at deep aching wounds:

as we really saw battles, as if our mothers died

and our fathers went mad;

as if we were raped on cement floors outside cities,

men standing at the door and sharing cigarettes.

 

but, really, these girls are too fantastic and too normal:

we are not fiction, we have not seen chaos or decay.

we only think and think and think and

overthink; it makes factories, spinning wheels,

valleys of ashes, ghouls and young boys

who are Sex and Death and also pedophiles.

Look, here is my Brave New World, created while

brushing my teeth.

Look, here is my Art, necessary to bleed out

the odd, fake darkness. Put it on a page

and make it pretty

so that I can go back to staring

at boys, thinking about sparkling eyes

and broad shoulders;

building and destroying the castles, the fantasies,

the cosmopolitan mornings after sex, with the slant of New York

seen through the window. your mouth wet around the cigarette,

love like the poets said it would be,

but there is no smoke, no grand after-effects.

I fall asleep with my head in your lap, you’re reading Kant,

I’m staring at my face in the mirror thinking

stopstopstopstopstop

turn it off and go

live.