What I Want From You
An Anthology
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All I want
is to be dipped in chocolate
a bathtub full of hot fudge
and a woman with an appetite
All I want
is a woman who can waste 2 hours and 3 cups of coffee
discussing how captains Kirk vs. Picard
would have handled a certain lawyer we know
who’s really a Romulan
All I want
is a woman who pulls the car over on the freeway
because she can’t wait another moment
to bury her face in my hair
All I want
is cool sheets
and a woman who understands
that sometimes making love
means kissing all night
All I want
is a woman who hides a rubber chicken
in my underwear drawer
All I want
is a woman who can unlace my nightgown
with her teeth
All I want
is to wake up every morning
to the same face
on a different woman
if you’ve got my number
call me
Razor
I’d hardly got undressed when he said:
My wife left me for another woman.
Hurt him like hell.
On my way out the door, I thought,
Honey, I can understand why.
When he ran into her at a bar
She was different, like a razor,
All nonchalance, cigarette, and shaved head.
A militant bitch who wouldn’t let anything slide.
That other one turned her against him.
If not for her, they could still get along.
The girlfriend eyed them discreetly
From above the jukebox.
You know me, Razor told him.
If I were miserable,
Then maybe I’d miss you.
If I were just sort of happy,
Then I’d be able to forgive you.
But the way it’s going, honey,
it doesn’t look good,
it doesn’t look good for you.
where they come from
sometimes
they claw their way out of me
poems I never meant to write
sometimes I vomit them up
can’t keep them down
the angry poems
you didn’t want to see
I didn’t want to show you
sometimes they take me by the throat
and I must
shout them out at you
or they will choke me
and then I am slain by the tears
you hold inside
shamed by my anger
humbled by futility
and I crawl back into
the fetal lock of bones and
confinement
and wait for the next
violent storm
to give me a window on
life
Shelter
We sleep between trees in the rain
without walls or windows,
feet twine on this cold night:
touch unfreezes the root.
Tonight we become anchor to each other,
your hand brushing back my hair,
breath passing from you to me, me to you,
now the question in my throat.
Goodbye to Marriage
Molly was burning under her white crust,
a lime kiln of infection suppurated her leg.
The yellow moisture corrupted her heart.
I thought we should break out
of this pattern, especially when I saw
hopelessness sear her tendons,
flood her socks, slosh her shoes.
I was philosophic, if not homiletic:
L.A. is an incurable graveyard, three hundred miles
from S.F., a flat basin of quivering lime pasties
or a pan of desert apples with desiccate taste.
She could hang on but I would be escaping.
No one would take better care of her than I had done.
We struck a deal with the neighbor, a plumber
who could caulk her pipes and care for her.
It was time to worry about myself— I was oozing uncontrollably,
my skin so thin and dry had become paper