Dear Lacuna, Dear Lard

I’m here, one fat cherry

blossom blooming like a clod,

one sad groat glazing, a needle puling thread,

so what, so sue me. These days what else to do but leer

at any boy with just the right hairline. Hey! I say,

That’s one tasty piece of nature. Tart Darkling,

if I could I’d gin, I’d bargain, I’d take a little troll

this moolit night, let you radish me awhile,

let you gag and confound me. How much I’ve struggled

with despicing you, always; your false poppets, relentless

distances. Yet plea-bargaining and lack of conversation

continue to make me

your faithful indefile. I’m lonely. I’ve turned

all rage to rag, all pratfalls fast to fatfalls for you,

My Farmer in the Dwell. So struggle, strife,

so strew me, to bell with these clucking mediocrities,

these anxieties over such beings thirty, still smitten

with this heaven never meant for, never heard from.

You’ve said we’re each pockmarked like a golf course

with what can’t be said of us, bred in us,

isn’t our tasty piece of nature. But I tell you

I’ve stars, I’ve true blue depths, have learned to use

the loo, the crew, the whole slough of pill-popping

devices without you, your intelligent and pitiless graze.

Everyone knows love is just a euphemism

for you’ve failed me anyway. So screw me.

Bartering Yam, regardless of want I’m nothing

without scope, hope, nothing

without your possibility. So let’s laugh

like the thieves we are together, the sieves:

you, my janus gate, my Sigmund Fraud,

my crawling, crack-crazed street sprawled out,

revisible, spell-bound.

Hello, joy. I’m thirsty. I’m Pasty Rectum.

In your absence I’ve learned to fill myself

with starts. Here’s my paters. Here’s my blue.

I just wanted to write again and say

how much I’ve failed you.

Source: The Invention of the Kaleidoscope (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007)