“And For My Next Trick I Will Turn Farcical Events Into Personal Tragedy”

Your Roman nose can only keep me intrigued for so long.

It isn’t your fault I sold you myself          for a song

set to the key of an afterparty of white stripes

inhaled up a couple cavities on a sailboat called Souza.

I don’t care how you move in me.

I mean, it suits me on the most primordial bodily plane.

By definition          is this cruelty?

It’s just, you’re a bit like accidentally tasting perfume —

pleasure from it is derived only when applied correctly

as it appeals to a single sense.

Also, there is no such thing as an angel in red.

Those go by another name.

At best I am a barfly hovering over her mezcal cocktail.

What do you want, baby? is a loaded question.

If you really must know

I’d like to lie in my own bed          in my socks,

watching nothing but nature documentaries on BBC.

You see, I used to crucify poets who wailed about sex;

it’s overdone          give up the gun!

Scores of more subjects under the sun!

God no longer cares how we want to have fun!

Look at me now; see what I’ve become.

Because as a girl I wanted to be two things:

a storyteller and          a real woman,

operating under the illusion that intercourse with a man

had the power to make me either.

Darling, how can I bare to your infinite simplicity

the calling of a professional           confessional bleeder?

One who hemorrhages both sentimentality and sorrow for a living?

That I don’t give a damn about your car but adore your dog?

That with these words — if read aloud or in private —

I force us both down a Via Dolorosa of my own device, placing

you and I somewhere between gladiators and          The Smithsonian.

And by rendering you sympathetic

I paint myself grotesque,

fully aware these are the species of verses that would make

any sound mother squeamish.

To be fair, I don’t know what I would do with a daughter like me either!

So when I cried          “Terra firma!”

as we wobbled, foggy-eyed, off the vessel of our first morning

I was not peppering dialogue with paltry dead language,

but in my way attempting to convey

the understanding that empires and affairs

founded on water won’t last.

What I want is to have told you freely, I like everyone crave solidity,

though I’m learning to give

translations of ancient tongues          only to those who ask.