HTKRMTSKTBSND:

Petra

Hello not real name, hello what it is I answer to these days, goodbye mother’s blessing, holy baptism, birth papers, penmanship practice. Hello, city of rock, Christ’s apostle, she who survived a great wave, as I wave goodbye, given name, hello, moniker, sobriquet, pet name, hello, Petra, Petra Pan, turning my head toward shadows, away from glum certainties of old age, call my name and diminutive, the child replies.

—

(Just let me keep writing these terrible things, okay, I’ll get to the good stuff maybe, maybe soon.)

BYRLMBLYDGBYDG:

Mourning

With all due respect, sir Gilbert, all you said of the heart
was that it is as helpless as crushed birds, it lies to itself
because it must, it is a foreign country, like language too is a lie.
You wrote to us about the heart: it one day stops, going so far
as to show us how it does, how it does, what has it done. All heart,
without you, I stop where you left off, the abandoned valley,
the white streets of Greece, or Rome, or the wonderful room
where you watched someone die, I survey the words and agree,
maybe none are enough, none of them will do, but you, sir, are not me.

Hi.

Happy new year. High time I started this up again, but excuse me if I move in directions unknown!

INTERLUDE #291,482:

I am writing this from my apartment, a small white box. I am writing this from a small white box, writing this into another small white box, intending to send it by email into another small white box, which you will open in order to read this. I am inside this small white box, thinking inside it, in terms of small white boxes, all of which you are reading now, having opened the small white box that is my writing, my writing from my apartment, my apartment. None of these boxes are alike, but inside this particular small white box, they are one and the same, the same small white box.

INTERLUDE:

Being Young Back Then
by Jack Gilbert

Another beautiful love letter
trying to win her back. Finished,
like each night, just before dawn.
Down the Corso Garibaldi to the Piazza
Fortebraccio. Across to the massive
Etruscan gate and up the Via
Ulisse Rocchi. To the main square.
Past the cathedral, past the fountain
of Nicola Pisano. And the fine
eleventh-century town hall.
To the post office so the letter
could get to California in three days.
Then to the palazzo to stand always
for a half hour look up to where
Gianna was sleeping. Longing for
her and dreaming of the other one.

FMCBTPKWYCLW:

Eve, Anew

The body the many animals bound, the mind the leash.
The furred monster in your throat that snores in its cave
of dark sleep, and the sedate pigeons of your ruffled,
ordinary hands. The wolf, two large cats, the flamingo.
The desert of your back, my dry mouth, your face an oasis.
Your mouth a neon sign that says Enter. Some nights 
you are a safari, by day a petting zoo. I wander through 
the brush, surrounded by your beasts, they watch as 
I pretend I’m blessed enough to name each one.

TWGTBTFPTMNTM:

Have you been thinking? she hissed as I stumbled into her apartment
at two in the morning, reeking of metaphysical unease. All night, I told her,
a fine spirit, aged twenty-five years in the oak barrel of my mind. Lets me
feel grown-up, I told her, makes me look older than I am, to drink deep from
this dark spirit, to choose to have it on the rocks.

–

Something too-easily dashed off this morning. Am unhappy with my writing but at least I’m writing. 

NTCPNSBMTBSTSW:

1
I’m dreaming in.
I’m your bed.
In your dreaming bed
I’m dreaming

2
In desolation we’re in sleep

Alternate line cuts to the previous poem:

The continent composed of all the countries you have been in
without me is enormous. In it is a constant European summer,
light jacket weather, scattered rainshowers. The flowers, I do
not have the names for them, but they bend their heads to be
blessed, regardless. The country composed of the cities I’m in,
without you, is a holy country, where it is always morning and
the coffee scalding. In the streets, the people fan their hands
in the heat, examining the sky, they wonder when it will rain.

—

(Previously: without.)

WTFSYNMLYRNR:

The continent composed of all the countries you have been in without me is enormous. In it is a constant European summer, light jacket weather, scattered rainshowers. The flowers, I do not have the names for them, but they bend their heads to be blessed, regardless. The country composed of the cities I’m in, without you, is a holy country, where it is always morning and the coffee scalding. In the streets, the people fan their hands in the heat, examining the sky, they wonder when it will rain.