The Realist

He did not know the difference
between good pain and bad pain.

Quote pain for me has always
been a kind of memory game--

to prick my fingers through
the strings of the guitar was a torture

each fresh ache tinged
with a lingering fear of death.

It was always something with him:
a sore finger, a sprained penis, a pulled ego.

I told him, in my days, you could
lose your ear by day

and still muster enough strength
to paint yourself in the moonlight.

Well, he started to believe if only he lived
in portraits his disease would be cured,

and here we are today: a real pair
of numb skulls-- his song and his scream

inseparable, as he bemoans a new
pain in each plucked string

and me, painting him over
a decade now, trying to reconcile

the pain of his song with the pain
of knowing him.

The Oval Portrait

to Margarete

“Your hair holds a whole dream.”
- Charles Baudelaire

The image must begin with an aversion:
the trophy hair, detached
from the head of the woman
he once loved, covers the canvas--

preserved, now, against the wall
of the museum, where we will
never find the face, only the obscure
half of the lover's head, as Eurydice.

It is this that the artist has suffered
to reproduce using Margarete’s hair--
manipulating the soft spot of our objectivity,
where form and body are set asunder,

to assure us that the nightmare
which we view is human.

Body Language

“It beggar’d all description”
- Anthony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare

You could anchor the tip of your tongue
in my mouth and sing my diagnosis--

sing through the spaces of my body,
as if it had surfaced out of Lethe,

filling each blank with your breath:
only then would each caesura ring true,

my paraphasia-medic,
in the sieve of your mouth

with the song that would sing out
my drowning.

Wish Bone

“The feminine in my soul will vibrate,
as inside a cathedral in mourning.”
- Cesar Vallejo, tr. Clayton Eshleman

You will not remember that dream
that fathered you-- drew your hands

towards my bones to shape a blank
for your own solidified wish.

The bone, with which you reenacted
your nightmare, could never crack:

the rib, in which you wished yourself
whole, was never realized, but was a fossil

from the future-- a late reminder
of the pain that will outlast your dream.

Swim

If the Sirens’ song could surface from
its own pregnant silence, it would say Swim.