sativa classis
The other side of the water
makes a figure of me. Who listens,
at dusk, now I can no longer
pretend no one is there.
Who was I when I could?
I was singing.
A love song.
High.
A child,
trying to call it on.
All speech is failed music,
a man I failed to make love me had said
over coffee, paraphrasing someone.
Address
There was the idea of love and then what.
Man Discovers Fire, Burns Self.
Practices losing weekends, months,
a season even, never enough not to be too much.
Like always wanting more cocaine
until the moment he wishes he’d done less,
the middle of the night is so short
and morning so long
when slept through. That’s one solution.
Sex works best, probably,
but an excess of feeling can be exhausted.
I mean exhausting. I tried exercising
but I liked not exercising too much.
Poetry if you’re hopeless,
novels if you like to feel smart,
though feeling smart only feels good
if you’re not. Better not feel
too much or too little of anything
to feel good. Balance is recommended
unless you hate balance because, like me,
you have a personality disorder.
You might try TV.
Maybe don’t have a personality disorder.
Self-care is hard but there’s no comedown.
Walking helps, whatever else
they tell you in therapy.
No feeling is final, Rilke writes
in a poem about god I pretend isn’t.
But you learned that already
on your way back up from the mirror,
from the burning, the whipping your head skyward,
the oh-god-why-can’t-it-always-be-like-this.
There is no god, there is no reason.
Everything is as it should be,
which doesn’t square politically but that’s DBT.
You have to choose what to feel bad about.
How to Feel Good
I woke up
and it was political.
I made coffee and the coffee was political.
I took a shower and the water was.
I walked down the street in short shorts and a Bob Mizer tank top
and they were political, the walking and the shorts and the beefcake
silkscreen of the man posing in a G-string. I forgot my sunglasses
and later, on the train, that was political,
when I studied every handsome man in the car.
Who I thought was handsome was political.
I went to work at the university and everything was
very obviously political, the department and the institution.
All the cigarettes I smoked between classes were political,
where I threw them when I was through.
I was blond and it was political.
So was the difference between “blond” and “blonde.”
I had long hair and it was political. I shaved my head and it was.
That I didn’t know how to grieve when another person was killed in America
was political, and it was political when America killed another person,
who they were and what color and gender and who I am in relation.
I couldn’t think about it for too long without feeling a helplessness
like childhood. I was a child and it was political, being a boy
who was bad at it. I couldn’t catch and so the ball became political.
My mother read to me almost every night
and the conditions that enabled her to do so were political.
That my father’s money was new was political, that it was proving something.
Someone called me faggot and it was political.
I called myself a faggot and it was political.
How difficult my life felt relative to how difficult it was
was political. I thought I could become a writer
and it was political that I could imagine it.
I thought I was not a political poet and still
my imagination was political.
It had been, this whole time I was asleep.
I Woke Up
Opposite him at this table again
and through the windows the city glittering, surreal as a scale model,
the city in miniature — only it moves in a real way, because it is real.
One of the windows is open, some construction down on the street
drones like a distant vacuum. It’s warm for January.
Still, his apartment has that dreamlike quality
of feeling like home though I know it’s not. Not mine anymore —
but how many people get to visit the past without hurting anything?
To come back and drink the same coffee
from the same never-quite-clean cup?
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