Isobel this life is a lonely life
And Billy Collins is still undressing Emily
Emily who?
She walked out of this life, death streaming
She walked out of this life and left us her silence
Isobel you are my best friend
Because you are teaching me to speak to pain
I thought I was mad at you but I was mad at you
I thought I was mad at you but I was mad at life
and what I couldn’t have of it
Oh Emily is gone, we never knew her
She wrote her lines in invisible flames
And now the sun is burning and so are we
And the filing cabinet by the train tracks is burning too
I like to think of you somewhere far ahead
I like to think of you far ahead of me
What I say to you I say to me
I don’t care about subtlety
I don’t care about forgiveness or God
All I care about is looking at things
And naming them
A rocking horse rocking on the banks of the river
Animals in their soft castles of meat
None of us are getting out of here alive
DAYLIGHT SAVINGS
I was trying to get at something
how the past illuminates the present
still swinging from the heart’s rafters
like a chandelier in an ambulance
back before I jettisoned forgiveness
and went over to the dark side
but describing love is a backwards talent
like a bad mental taxidermy
where everything living comes out stuffed
your eyes forever frozen in the headlights of this poem
as I speed closer and closer
All our jokes
like a laugh track at a funeral
all our punchlines unintended
like the time I followed you
for hours in lingerie
up a mountain, in the middle of a fight
to reach the waterfall you said was there
only to arrive at the top and find nothing
but a blue tarpaulin flapping in the breeze
like a plastic Niagara
Or last Christmas, cutting my hair
on the steps of your childhood home
underneath a poster that said
look to the sun and the shadows will fall behind
but I want to talk about return
and how pain can be a place of welcome
how you took off my clothes on a blow-up mattress
a hand-drawn skull & crossbones
shivering on the door
Daylight savings and the clocks burn
Some dark spring hour stolen from a time
I did not know your name
O Anna
Neither our love nor our failures will save us
all our memories
like tin cans on a wedding car
throwing up sparks
like pumping the dog’s anal glands
on our first anniversary
or lifting your bedpan
through an inner-city hospital
or back before all of it
when we first fell in love
the heart like a trick candle
on an ancient, moss-dark birthday cake
and you read aloud on the steps each night
from a book on forensic anthropology
maggots like white static
frosting the summer air
Our love a broken scale
always tipping between laughter and grief
all those summers written in stale diamonds
the black years gone, and a green one
rolling away from the stem
as the telescope drains of stars
& you wake up alive again
I feel a lot of hate for people
and want to ride the white horse
and mine
and not in favour of your enemies
who I must privately belittle
until they vanish into the footnotes
of the shitty things we say about them but you remind me
the best justice is unthinking
to ride these broken carriages
through the debris of the past
and never look back
O Anna
let us jettison the manky quilts
of our foremothers
still laughing at the reins
and this poem too
like an expensive fur coat
tried on once but never worn
tossed beneath a moving wheel
never once caring
what died to make it
HAVING ALREADY WALKED OUT ON EVERYONE
I EVER SAID I LOVED
I pause for a moment at your door
And consult my fate
This life is more stupid than even I could have hoped for
Every day a search party gets lost in the snow
With no one to dig them out again
I have tried for too long to act in ways that seem reasonable
Yet somehow, this makes me double-unreasonable?
Like flicking someone’s bra-strap at a coroner’s inquest
The official theme of this poem is
The official theme of all my poems which is
You get in love and then you die!
Oh write it in rhinestones on the lid of my coffin
Some people are too hard to be lived without
Once upon a time I used to feel like ............ huh
But then I started to feel a little more like .................................. uhuh
Once upon a time I used to feel like ................. ??
But then I started to feel a little more like ................................. ????????
Having already walked out on everyone I ever said I loved
Things do not bode well for you
But things do also not bode well for me
Every year life gets less and less acceptable
And I feel uncertain of how to proceed in an appropriate fashion
To anticipate heartache is a grim satisfaction
Like tripping down a staircase in a peach negligee
Or an ancient forest with a new corsage of flames
It pleases me to subject myself to such whimsical hurt feelings
But under my main feelings, I have other, worse feelings
Like an auxiliary moat in which black swans are circling
If I ever die young I’m going to do it in style
..... like a Great Gatsby-themed suicide attempt!
Having already walked out on everyone I ever said I loved
I have so little left to say to you
I pause for a moment at your door
My eyes pouring out across the darkness
Oh let us not be little bitches to one another
Life is hard enough as it is
Life is hard enough and fast enough
And there is nothing in this world worth doing
But shaking our heads in awe
A little wind shifts the branches
A bird flies out of the radio and off into silence
I can hardly believe this
I can hardly believe this life
Every time I knock you let me in
KEATS IS DEAD SO FUCK ME FROM BEHIND
Keats is dead, so fuck me from behind
Slowly and with carnal purpose
Some black midwinter afternoon
While all the children are walking home from school
Peel my stockings down with your teeth
Coleridge is dead, and Auden too
Of laughing in an overcoat
Shelley died at sea and his heart wouldn’t burn
And Wordsworth ......
They never found his body
His widow mad with grief, hammering nails into an empty meadow
Byron, Whitman, our dog crushed by a garage door
Finger me slowly
In the snowscape of your childhood
Our dead floating just below the surface of the earth
Bend me over like a substitute teacher
& pump me full of shivering arrows
O emotional vulnerability
Bosnian folk-song, birds in the chimney
Tell me what you love when you think I’m not listening
Wallace Stevens’s mother is calling him in for dinner
But he’s not coming, he’s dead too, he died sixty years ago
And nobody cared at his funeral
Life is real
And the days burn off like leopard print
Nobody, not even the dead can tell me what to do
Eat my pussy from behind
Bill Manhire’s not getting any younger
NEW THINGS
What’s the point of saying new things?
I once said to the man
I had just started seeing
When he said there was no point writing about him
Because he was just another mediocre white man
And the Western canon already had that covered
What is there to say about the world that hasn’t already been?
More to the point
Who gives a shit?
Three thousand years of standing at the lakeside
Mourning the fall of the Byzantine Empire
I’m as bored of it as anyone
and Shakespeare too
We should all move to the country and fuck each other’s brains out
Still, there are better things to be than original
So maybe I can say jazz apothecary
Or ham pantyliner
But it gives me no pleasure
To mean so little
And get so far away with it
What is there to say about love that hasn’t already been
Three thousand years of grass and wind
We lay on the banks of the field behind your house
Oh there is nothing to do in this life
The world describes itself again
Black curtains on the windows, pinned up with needles
All across the field, small lights falling
Like snow on a virgin rollercoaster
And trees, I am still crazy
I can barely look at you
I can barely say the words out loud
I could be dead so many years ago
PAIN IMPERATIVES
After Chelsey Minnis
You have to slap yourself in the face with a mohair glove
You have to challenge yourself to a mini-duel
You have to rub your hands on your thighs and think about pain
A little pain comes on, and you get tiresome again
The past is a bad invention that keeps on happening
And it hurts to think about, like an unpaid bill
It’s the wind dragging the desert backwards at night
& it burns you, like a little pastel whip
You have to think like this all day in a cucumber facemask
You have to lie very still and wish you were dead
You have to think ‘love has radicalised me’ & walk around like Helen of Troy
You have to walk around until the ships burn off
It’s beautiful to be so self-absorbed
It’s like being cursed with looking
You look and look and only see your fate
This is ~ reading the entrails of live animals ~
This is ~ spinning a crystal ball on your index finger ~
To make a small ugliness large is a grandiose mediocrity
It’s like the World of Wearable Art
I write this poem like a chastity belt made of bottle caps
Please don’t blame me for all the terrible thing I am about to say to you
It’s so sad to be in love and not enough of it
It’s so sad to been in love and not be still
It’s so sad to be with someone so sad
It’s so sad to want to
The moral of poetry is too lonely to be written
It’s a sad old hygiene, like Cleopatra’s hand soap
This is using a jackhammer to bust open a music box
The box cracks and minor notes come drifting out
Poetry should be democratic—that’s the modern view
It’s like a murder on a train where everyone did it!
This is a shared misery, like crying someone else to sleep
It’s the sugared hole at the top of the mountain where the flag goes in
It’s a bad crime to say poetry in poetry
It’s a bad, adorable crime
Like robbing a bank with a mini-hairdryer
I should never do it—and nor should anyone
But it’s boring to be so tasteful.
It’s like never masturbating to Lucy Liu
I write this poem like double-leopard print
Like an antique locket filled with pubic hair
You have to stay up each night as a love punishment
You have to handcuff yourself to the past and swallow the key
You have to think tragic sex thoughts like fucking in a casket
You have to say true-sounding things and never mean them
You have to look people in the eye, and say ‘uh oh’
You have to drag your heart across the room like a heavy chair
You have to tell yourself what you need and do the opposite
You have to be staggered by the cruelty of it
Life!
I should never have thought I could do it
It’s like playing the violin in fuzzy handcuffs
It’s like the punchline to a long-forgotten joke
Ground down by empires
Blown across millennia by the black winds of destiny
This is breathing through a megaphone
Or begging for mercy in a Russian phrasebook
I write this poem like an obituary in Comic Sans
I write it like suicide hotline hold music
This is a raunchy philosophy, like losing your virginity to Plato
It’s like doing a line of sherbet off a toilet seat
This is a teenage sadness, like going to sleep in a prom dress
This is putting on mascara to cry yourself to sleep
You have to make a career out of your pain
You have to pinch yourself and think ow like you mean it
You have to live to an old age and regret many things
You have to stay alive long enough to want to
You have to fall in love all over again
With the same person all over again
You have to believe in forgiveness, but never do it
It’s an unfair generosity, like having to share a grave
A year goes by and you start having dreams
Wet black flowers pouring out of the telephone
The past stirs behind you on a windless night
It overcomes you like a luxury blow-wave
This is an extravagant poverty—like an IOU in a stripper’s g-string
It’s like wet sequins blowing down the highway strip
This is a chaste vulgarity, like a well-starched nipple tassel
This is opening your trenchcoat to reveal another
trenchcoat
I throw you down on the bed and kiss your neck
It’s a juvenile delinquency, like smashing a toy ukulele
It’s like a Ouija board spelling a/s/l?
It’s getting me haunted again
This is dull propaganda—like stock footage of the heart
It’s like weeping over opera subtitles
This is a well-choreographed melodrama—with a complimentary fainting chair
It gets you smoking in a
gold kimono
This is a Pyrrhic victory, like falling in love
It’s having so little to say, you hire a skywriter to stay home
This is storming out in the middle of a bar fight, your bonnet strands streaming
You cry and cry, impressing no one
You think you know your life, and then it changes
Time caves in and obliterates the heart
I write this like a sitcom flashback
Like a calendar trembling in a sepia breeze
Someone enters the room and your heart stops
It’s an invisible trembling, like a vibrator in an earthquake
This is a higher truth, like a haunted polygraph
It’s a church billboard blowing down the interstate
This is sucking dick with a raised pinky finger
It’s a bossa nova cover of the Crimean war
This is an upmarket nonconformity, like a Trelise Cooper eco-bag
It’s a pentagram in your cappuccino foam
Poetry is a fake nostalgia, like dollhouse curtains flapping in the breeze
It rears up behind you on its antique leg brace
This is like an encore to an empty auditorium
It’s a swarm of hornets rising out of the piano
Who was it that said ‘the life we enter is not the one we leave’?*
It’s an arcane law, like falling in love
It’s like a game of musical chairs, but they keep adding more chairs
You get up to leave, but the gramophone goes on and on
This is a premature ventriloquism
Like a séance for someone who isn’t dead yet
This is a fatal pretension—like hanging yourself with a velvet rope
I sign it like a death receipt
This is: stop hitting yourself!
It’s pushing a pork roast in a vintage pram
This is an empty cuckoo clock, fast approaching midnight