How to Hang with Strangeness

everywhere, people are stupid
everywhere, people are worn out

i have lived for a long time now
take this piece of advice

only open your skirt to strangeness
if you’re prepared to handle it, to sleep

through the sleepless nights, to cut
the fat and occasionally an eye.

don’t eat your mother, let heal
what is broken half-heartedly

only break ceramic gifts occasionally
cherish the rest half-seriously

give yourself 5 minutes of crying time
intermittently, don’t take anything personally

and prepare to let go of your personality,
your riches cannot help you now.

stitch its name in broad letters
then cross it out. find no time

to answer emails. play the game badly
head for disaster now and then

say you’re a horrible friend,
then watch what happens

in the corner of your eye.
say I infrequently with emphasis,

be empathetic to children in need
and don’t feed the monster

Headdress

I am hovering about you,
a bee in a headdress,

a man in a dress, so ungodly
and ugly, the plants in your

sacred garden wither,
and take on odd colours

and then some. I am
busying myself in your bonnet,

your plastic face keeps resembling
my scary childhood clown face,

your fingers prodding the nowheres
of my body, and your general

staying away, which also hurts me
immensely, this red sticker face.

Waste

The deadness of this thought is so obvious to me now.
Even if you reportedly died trying to call me,

I wouldn’t believe it, and it wouldn’t become me. The only
problem now is what to do with these poems littering the riverside,

all this energy spent, all this good rubber on wheels,
all this snow I arranged for you, all these thought processes.

Thank you again. I am confident that
there will be no further disturbing of my brain.

Repeat Death

Death brushes by me again,
in the shape of a wounded wing

attached to this woman thing.
Small, insignificant and difficult,

taking all my time and my eyes,
this repeat death is slow and nearly

unnoticeable. Scalpel sharp enough
to cut humans and kittens in half

with minimal effort and near-to-no
stirring of agitated bodies.

Residue is painful though,
bleeding and abandoned

litter of the future,
delayed once more.

Look at the trains leaving,
look at them go.

Look at the unsaid
hovering above the sleepers.

Just say no, wait for the next
galaxy to be born,

to breathe in and out. Wait
for the next slow death.

Gnats

It’s cemented in me now,
the knowledge

that I am not wanted
in this way. Finally

I can rest, take a long lost
break from these troubling

thoughts.
The gnats swarming

about my head
will finally go away.

Arachnophilia

I search for your nocturnal self among the spiders in the attic,
my fingers grope in the deep indigo of this dream, but you do not show.

Perhaps you are still on a caravan journey through the desert,
letting books rot away on the shelf.

Were you looking for shells on the beach, did you wear a dress
even in that scorching heat? I could have been your husband

making huts from twigs I found in the sand. I swam
in the folds of your dress. Songs would have issued from heaven.

Could have. Time is never ripe. We are still such mindful creatures
and do not heed that quiet command.

See the trembling cealing. We walk sideways and askew
in separate corridors, like halting spiders, awkard and silent.

Satie

Echoing the vein, the pang:
the slow lightning, the gentle
catastrophe, nothing

as purple was ever said.
Had I been stroking
his cloudy beard,

taken his glasses off,
scalpelled his heart out,
it wouldn’t have given me this.

I couldn’t burn
more slowly. You are
eating your sallad

in retrograde, lifting
stains with your mouth.
Tongue ever more

tasteless, hands growing
shyer, smaller,
infinitely retreating, breathing

in. Every fifth year the sun
expands, every fifth year
exhales.

Reaching an empty
stomach, so it might begin
again. It doesn’t help.

Satie is always
delayed. Like my age,
dreaming of unspoiled

fruit, a healthy seed,
neutral to music, the prejudice,
all our love, and taking

its time. Fine cigars
appease us, stately names,
e-mail replies

from presidents. Our bodies
never were in such wealth,
never so photographed.

Worshipping wounds
grown invisible,
we put on

our dresses
and another CD
of Satie –

Lunch will ever come,
will ever throw
dressing on our trousers.

How non-metaphorical
were those headaches
brought on by sullied clothes?

How far from a Jesus stain
in your crotch, the singing
which cannot stop.