The Year of Deprivation

Henceforth how your era shall be known.

Immoveable man, I would rage at you
if you were malleable as seacliffs.
Hell is a pebble
thrown at
the moon, occasionally,
until all its white chalk
breaks off and
floats away.
Powder white, power of
cyclical reflection
joining the dodo bird, the polar bear soon.

This year reduces that rubble
to rubble.

Once, I drank milk.
Mixed with honey,
crouching in your kitchen
until you took the empty carton.
I woke up that night with the vomit of shame
and genealogical punishment in my mouth.
Women don't consume that way,
humans aren't even made to drink milk.

You ran out and in and saved me
scooping my nausea into your hands
the sandy chalk of missing enzymes.
But my deficiency is still
the centerpiece of this story, isn't it? ISN'T IT?

No, it is, and
strange that so much lack
builds such a carnival of artifices.
Fuck you, language, you really fucked me
on this one. I guess I needed you to,
since I wasn't getting fucked in the morning.

Men always told me that the perfect woman
makes love in the morning,
our eyes still sealed
breath hot lashes gums wooly.
I am white satin panties, garters,
boned corsets,
little hands,
disappearing demurity who baked her bones into pie crusts,
the most essential flour for your tongue,
navel flower,
clingy fingernails which burrow into sheets
which you tuck in the sides before we sleep.

I spent half, or more,
of my year of deprivation
in fetal position.

That pull of cello strings is
my vertebrae
snapping into place.

Tugs

If loyalty is all,
I face, roundly,
your effacement of
my standard.

Songfulness enters
it, and love's uselessness
functions like slicing
a mango,
rivulets of a pressed pit
scurrying into my sleeves,

and I am forced to angle
my elbow downward, if
loyalty is all. I can
oh, pardon us.

The redemption of wonder,
for one, that your childish
nostalgia can offer us,
"a school",
seminal saturation,
square quotes proper,
earrings of bike tires.


But more proper
to say the respect for
a possibility! I may not
yell anymore,
my sweet work screams.
I'd like to leave pretty
and soon, even while
you stick around. But oh,

loyalty is all and
possibility, you damn
leathered red floozy.

I think you'd like my small hands, godless man. I would fold unto you like a china doll, and I think you'd read to me at night. And I don't know when I'd sleep again, because I already don't. I'll keep believing in god and strain out the stains in my narrative, I'm a drug addict, I'm so and so's niece, I was to be married once, he left me for spoons and cotton balls. You are Didion and I am Didion. I don't believe it's anything essential, I don't believe that's anything essential. You are a replacement, any man is a replacement, for god in my gut. China doll china doll but only if you ask me. To dinner, to protect my honor, to the front door with a shake and nothing more. My radiator is broken do you know how to fix it, it scares me at night. China doll china doll.

Dare I? I do dare:
Come to me, come to me in spring. Come to me stateside, my side of the states. You bring those lazy almond eyes and I, I will feed you and nourish you with all the rest.
Climb the stairs of my building, across the street from where Ginsberg wrote Howl, up to my room. Come only with the intention of kissing me, kissing me on the mouth and nowhere else, like I was to kiss you and no one else in Berlin. And then thumb through my books, find the one that seals the deal, and undress us because of it, because I have the right book and what that means about me.

Follow me, follow me here in the flesh and to my flesh because you already follow me. I open my schoolbook and the prologue is a quote from Herzog, by Saul Bellows, "For instance? Well, for instance, what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organised power. Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by..."

Teach me, teach me again to roll cigarettes, this time with the confetti raspy tomb tobacco stateside. Come to me, come to me in spring because I hardly remember you at all. I am sure I am writing to myself this time and not you. But I want, do I want.

What shall we do? What we shall do, darling. For instance, anything that has a devil may care tinge upon it, teeth marks on it, crushed pomegranate bruises on it, a whip of red horse hair across it, hot apple cider to soothe it.

I resolve, most resolutely, for this new year to never yell.

Your eyes are lazy almonds. I don't remember what your eyelashes are like but i remember the droop of those lazy, lazy almonds.