All Present

half past half future
barely any now

no past no future
all present

Ever Young

Now that I am twenty-six, I feel older than ever. No one will believe what I say. We don't count, for example. Anything seems to mean something. Everyone else is younger than I ever was. Older people have forgotten what it was like to be alive. Horrible. You knew you were making a mistake but you wanted to do it anyway. You thought you could take it. Wrong was the higher right, like Trump. (I can't believe you said that.) I was developing my taste so I could dispense with thinking, thinking I knew what people were trying to do, and why. Now I understand. I will never be old or ever young.

In the Dark

what I didn't say didn't fit
how she had to insist on being
herself in her own terminology
embarrassing missteps intimate
misunderstandings grotesque
attempts to obliterate desire
or find another truer way

what I didn't say saved face
the poet's lost illusion wasted
words jumbled into other sense
pain reinterpreted as pleasure
filth as a higher cleanliness
space as time spent reading
looking for another North Pole

what I didn't say stays lost
unexcavated ore undiscovered
as if no one had ever been there
looking for meaning in the dark
flickering word torches dropped
go out relit seem sadder still
not to have honored everything

Real Feeling

if I can change the words
does that change what is
knee strong skin smooth
has the Moor real feeling
the English Jew real life
can centuries' cruelty be
erased the earth reborn
innocent and perfectible
as an uncorrupted child
can what I merely think
remake a broken world