Just for a Thrill: Poems

Mesopotamia

MESOPOTAMIA everybody went crazy over the war bodies shattering in the streets strange utterances in the hallways lovers abandoning each other among the ruins children & calves born without skin ramble through the shadows & faint cries in the rafters echo stillborn dreams 23 * we lost each other the evening the bombs fell a sun disappeared moments ago its light unable to play in your fine hair & in its absence agitated voices arise —we’ve lost control our fantasies are becoming confused there’s too much pressure a voice raised in passion must be stilled we must sacrifice love to the sounds of ghosts our eyes must not meet our hands our bodies must not touch so often & murderers suddenly appear over the wires, in our presence 24 * & what if there had been light? what’s left behind is a digest of unshared moments a trolley car in approaching spring a brook emerging from a final dirty snow a moment on the shore an ancient river mountains exposing themselves in the azure mist but no: in the end there was only a dream born without skin 25 * either the dream or this burden haunts us now all the smoke refuses to disperse & the stench strangles the glitter from these self-congratulatory exercises this time it’s hard to say where these lies leave us alone & drugged in your tiny room assuring yourself of victory uncertain of the source of tomorrow’s challenge yet never wavering in the belief that friends need to be told only what they’re ready to hear & as we wait in the dark street trading tales of murderers something precious is dying & in the little window above a woman extinguishes the light 26 * only recently we said each life was sacred that our development would lead to your happiness & a life by the sea a window open to the wind was yours—& ours—for only the asking but war arrived with its exposures & lies with its sky choked by accusations with its waters sullied by anxiety & lovers were suddenly torn apart at the genitals 27 * the smoke doesn’t clear the season of the cross the hour of ancient memories the moment we realize what we’ve lost arrives & in the midst of the charred corpses of the blackened sky in flames of an earth poisoned by infantile romances an empty soul basks in the gritty afternoon proclaiming once again its victory over the living 28 ...