My Privacy

I’m tortured in my poems so I can be

Thankful, attentive, funny, giving

In my everyday life.

What results is a representation

Of my personality in verse

Not at all like the one you’d see

In the bodega or the classroom.

If you caught me at a party?

You have no idea.

Poems are useless except

In this one way, of making us better

For each other outside them.

Though it’s likely that I’m wrong,

That I’m actually more pleasant in my poems

Than in the flesh, which would explain

Why people sometimes treat me

Like a brute.

My self-esteem is such

That when this happens, I am given

To believing them.

Or so it used to be,

My self-esteem,

Before I realized I had to believe myself good

In order to become it.

Now I feel less angst when I wake up

And if I do I do my best

To pour it in my poems,

Which have the misfortune of serving

As receptacles for bad feeling.

But here I have to remind myself

That poems can’t be receptacles at all:

Nothing in them

Could exist elsewhere

And au contraire,

They should be feared for their designs

To overwrite your life.

A child told me that, and she was right.

We were walking a terrier in the rain

When I bade my lover stop

To smell a rose.

Just sniff! I said

There is a world of scent in there

If only you would suck.

He did, though what he smelt

Was perfectly unknowable to me.

This is often how it feels

To write a poem, which I love

To remind my students

Cannot help but begin in private.

What’s privacy?

I wish they’d ask

So I could tell them it’s the big illusion

Of solitude

To which language itself

Gives the lie.

The way an empty field

Is churning underneath

With whole societies of worms?

That’s like my privacy:

So green and dense it looks like one big plot.

Cuntstruck

The amazing thing resists language

Like rituals or snow

And all there is to say

Is the enemy of art

A leash of pablum link-by-link

One blushes upon yielding to

But what if now it’s true

You did come from the past

You did enter my life from underneath

And run the footage back to budding cells

My cum like disassociated rain

Your cum like what

The angels use to gel their hair

The movement of your wrist

Involves my death

It jogs the future’s memory

Then bids me cast aside my SSN

My theater and vitamin

So I might serve the overlord

Whose glove I am become

Because I’m old

I see what kind of messenger you are

Who yanks my chain

Who passes like a volt

Between my eye

I cede my bowl

I kneel before my guillotine

Like words before the force

Of what we know