Words

Your mouth sets free this captive
come close to me
Free me
Untangle the madness that knots me

Explosives have nothing compared to these sparks
So let’s fall apart

I’ll be by the fire
Thinking, nothing I’ve learned can prepare me
For everything else that needs learning

I had given him a life not worth living, but I had also given him an iron will to live. This was a common combination on the planet Earth.

The Fourteenth Book is entitled, “What Can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?” It doesn’t take long to read The Fourteenth Book. It consists of one word and a period.
This is it:
“Nothing.”

All I’ve ever learned from love was how to shoot somebody who outdrew you

Later, years later, I would hear a song made of our meeting. The boy who sang it was unskilled, missing notes more often than he hit, yet the sweet music of the verses shone through his mangling. I was not surprised by the portrait of myself: the proud witch undone by the hero’s sword, kneeling and begging for mercy. Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep.

I touched the thought like a bruise, testing its ache.

But maybe boredom is erotic, when women do it, for men.

Those eyes, those endless mud brown pools of sticky, bottomless love.