I don't like these drugs anymore


Greely Myatt, I gotta learn to talk (detail), 2006

Opus 21
-- by William Kloefkorn

How satisfying to have gone to a concert
featuring someone now famous you have broken
bread with. There was music, too, in the way

she lifted her fork to her mouth, music in the fork
that delivered the music that was the food
to sustain her. I meanwhile hum along

with the breeze that plays the oak leaves
like the fretted instrument my mother refused
to buy me. Obviously, I am looking

for something more than a mother to lay the wreaths
of my imperfections at the foot of. The bread
she baked was worth far more than the price

of forgiveness. In the kitchen its aroma
continues to drive me insane. In Gilead there is
neither sustenance nor balm. William, you should

stop your whining and buy yourself a good used
violin. Your audience cannot sit
silent on its hands forever, now can it.


My Love For All Things Warm and Breathing
-- by William Kloefkorn

I have seldom loved more than one thing at a time,
yet this morning I feel myself expanding, each
part of me soft and glandular, and under my skin
is room enough now for the loving of many things,
and all of them at once, these students especially,
not only the girl in the yellow sweater, whose
name, Laura Buxton, is somehow the girl herself,
Laura for the coy green mellowing eyes, Buxton
for all the rest, but also the simple girl in blue
on the back row, her mouth sad beyond all reasonable
inducements, and the boy with the weight problem,
his teeth at work even now on his lower lip, and
the grand profusion of hair and nails and hands and
legs and tongues and thighs and fingertips and
wrists and throats, yes, of throats especially,
throats through which passes the breath that joins
the air that enters through these ancient windows,
that exits, that takes with it my own breath, inside
this room just now my love for all things warm and
breathing, that lifts it high to scatter it fine and
enormous into the trees and the grass, into the heat
beneath the earth beneath the stone, into the
boundless lust of all things bound but gathering.


Ludi Jr. Sits Quietly Through The Passing Along of His Father's Advice
-- by William Kloefkorn

do not shoot the rabbit
through either its good eye
or the one that most offends vou
do not sit too easily
in the lap of you
know who I mean
return the air freshener
the comicbooks the lifesavers
to the drugstore
remember one of the following:
father mother
do not neglect
the days of the calendar
that bar of soap
you carved the other night:
shred it like ripe cabbage
into the throat of the drain
do not want the words
that the unkind give you
do not tell betty jean's mother
what under betty jean's underwear
is growing
remember this trinity
to keep it holy:
blood is sour
and verily verily
when the dark asks you
say no