Tenderness

Back then when so much was clear
and I hadn't learned
young men learn from women

what it feels like to feel just right,
I was twenty-three,
she thirty-four, two children, a husband

in prison for breaking someone's head.
Yelled at, slapped
around, all she knew of tenderness

was how much she wanted it, and all
I knew
were back seats and a night or two

in a sleeping bag in the furtive dark.
We worked
in the same office, banter and loneliness

leading to the shared secret
that to help
National Biscuit sell biscuits

was wildly comic, which led to my body
existing with hers
like rain that's found its way underground

to water it naturally joins.
I can't remember
ever saying the exact word, tenderness,

though she did. It's a word I see now
you must be older to use,
you must have experienced the absence of it

often enough to know what silk and deep balm
it is
when at last it comes. I think it was terror

at first that drove me to touch her
so softly,
then selfishness, the clear benefit

of doing something that would come back
to me twofold,
and finally, sometime later, it became

reflexive and motiveless in the high
ignorance of love.
Oh abstractions are just abstract

until they have an ache in them. I met
a woman never touched
gently, and when it ended between us

I had new hands and new sorrow,
everything it meant
to be a man changed, unheroic, floating.

ygUDuh

ygUDuh

ydoan
yunnuhstan


ydoan o
yunnuhstand dem
yguduh ged


yunnuhstan dem doidee
yguduh ged riduh
ydoan o nudn


LISN bud LISN


dem
gud
am


lidl yelluh bas
tuds weer goin


duhSIVILEYEzum

Requisition Article 7

I love you like the paper clips I’ve arranged
into the shape of a heart on my clandestine desk
which was given to me by the prime governor
of Sufrani during my deracinated trip to Africa
while working on several not unimportant projects

I like the way you kiss me,
it reminds me of how egregious girls
used to kiss in Nebraska farmyards
when the winter was coming
and they were hungry dogs

I enjoy the dances that you do
and the way you insist I only
give you dollar bills
even though I’m exceptionally rich

I love the deregionalised morning after
in grand hotels which they pay for;
that amelioration of categorical joy
and the epic liquidation of the individual.

I like your eyes.
they never look at me the wrong way.

I enjoy you.

I love the adventure of creeping off to mountain huts
and the 6 a.m. petit mort blues, when you sit there
in nothing but your shoes.

I like the way we smell together,
that mix of woman and cigar.

I enjoy being your representative in government
during these historic epoch-making times,
you serve your country like a soldier down in Alamo
providing veritable ease to the governors

I love telling you what to do
to me.

Shoes

when you're young
a pair of
female
high-heeled shoes
just sitting
alone
in the closet
can fire your
bones;
when you're old
it's just
a pair of shoes
without
anybody
in them
and
just as
well.