I lay awake thinking clever things I could have said


Rebecca Kennedy, Glowing Eyes, Pastel

thinking about ecstasy
-- by jack gilbert

gradually he could hear her. stop, she was saying,
stop! and found the bed full of glass,
his ankles bleeding, driven through the window
of her cupola. california summer. that was pleasure.
he knows about that: stained glass of the body
lit by our lovely chemistry and neural ghost.
pleasure as fruit and pleasure as ambush. excitement
a wind so powerful, we cannot find a shape for it,
so our apparatus cannot hold on to the brilliant
pleasure for long. enjoyment is different.
it understands and keeps. the having of the having.
but ecstasy is a question. doubling sensation
is merely arithmetic. if ecstasy means we are
taken over by something, we become an occupied
country,the audience to an intensity we are
only the proscenium for. the man does not want
to know rapture by standing outside himself.
he wants to know delight as the native land he is.

the edge of the world
-- by jack gilbert

I light the lamp and look at my watch.
four-thirty. tap out my shoes
because of the scorpions, and go out
into the field. such a sweet night.
no moon, but urgent stars. go back inside
and make hot chocolate on my butane burner.
i search around with the radio through
the skirl of the Levant. "tea for two"
in german. finally, cleveland playing
the rams in the rain. it makes me feel
acutely here and everybody somewhere else.

To A Politician
-- by bernadette meyer

your penis is homeless
you are covered with as many warts as the lies you've told
you pat maggots on their backs
your syphilitic mouth sucks the slugs from the irradiated cocks of your
cohorts
this gives a bad name to syphilis, if I mention it in relation to you
your asshole farts from overeating of civilian casualties
the toxic fingernails of your leprous hands
flip through the reports of your medievally botulistic bubonic policies
your brain is full of lice, tickling it with greed for pesticide-ish powder
cockroaches fill your pancreas with their eggs
but this is an insult to cockroaches
your lungs fill with the blood of the dead
poisonous snakes of freedom crawl into your every orifice, but to no
avail
spiders come out of your nose
your heart is being pinched by Lyme-diseased tics, stung by killer bees,
bitten by the rattlesnakes of prevarication
first thing every morning your gangrenous arms embrace the rabid
turds of your generals
your penis is the size of the junkie's needle
your nostrils resemble the assholes of cops
it seems to us you convert your farts into speeches
your disease-ridden mouth is full of the incurable sores of your lies
your petrified eyes eat the bulimic vomit of your violent words
all words, all humans, insulted, disgusted, by your depraved existence.