Some of us are just wilderness children.
**
We have no patterns for relating across our human differences as equals.
—Ibram X. Kendri
**
One has questions of course. It starts when you’re just old enough to despise Jacques Lacan. I don’t give a damn about the mirror as metaphor.
**
In the monastery at Velamo
I took a sauna bath with a monk
Who was one hundred years old
And in the steam his skin
Smelled like strawberries.
“What do you like to eat?” I asked.
“Strawberries,” he said.
**
And so the war doesn’t end
Though they promised the young
It would be so—the dreamlike president
Spoke from a cloud all Jehovah and shit
I’m with you he said we’re all in this he said
But if you looked closely
**
Tree children hiding…
**
It’s like Dante, everyone
Up to his or her neck
In a self loathing stew
And down at the peace and harmony shop
They’re eating butterfly wings…
**
It was good, I saw, to have a secret. Let the other kids with their baseball gloves and bats have at it in the field. I had Pagliacci.
**
I wish to explain myself
I don’t want to talk to others
Where is my home?
Where?
**
How he spends his life
Believing there’s another,
Standing on his own shoulders
Looking out to sea.
*
Ghosts
In grass at dusk
Silly he thinks
A cricket animism
**
Late afternoon
Railway station
I’ve got Salvatore Quasimodo
Inside me
No one can see it
Planet of the Blind 