Christmas, Eve of 2001

Blessed is the curse, it’s complete here—there’s coffee and Leonard Cohen

and the bed is empty, and dusty eyelid shades are drawn

and the unwashed windows protect me from a sky that I’ve questioned

more times than I care to remember.

there’s classical music to stillbirth the rampage inside

and saviors nailed to my walls keeping me doomed, alone

and poised. Behind bloated eyes and stained glasses and muddled fingers

and crooked teeth comes the polemic of self. Food is my only savior. I’ll nail myself there

by night’s end and hate you for it. Forgiving the broken tortured friends,

who pretend not to pretend and ignore the obvious long enough for it to matter.

The heater stifles a cruel Southern California winter, scant by most standards.

Mellifluous the holocaust violin, it permits the floodgates to open and this to happen.

Christmas the eve of 2001, I’ll yearn for the apes and their wisdom

and their honesty and their attention. The gas prices are up and the going is gone and the

getting’s good. Instead of Christmas carol’s I’m listening to my toilet and my garbage

disposal. The flesh is a tired costume worn thin and rented too many times.

Instead of Christmas carols I’m listening to funeral dirges and the baking is killing me

my back is crooked, my throat is raw & the coconut flakes feel as fiberglass on my

twisted claw fingers, silken from jerking off in cathode tube & lightless trance.

The electric blanket offers cancer and the dreamcatcher no relief

the insipid desires I’ve practiced to shreds hate me for their overuse.

The desk is a cutting board for my unpracticed craft.

I’m going down now, but probably not for the last time

I’m going down now, and the wounded healer needs help

he always asks and tells everything, but when the final moment

comes he still feels the old wounds and fills the same empty spaces with

the same things that don’t work

Is there a canopy in store for me?

Sunrise, sunset. Sunrise, sunset.

Godspeed the cure and the answer and the way out

nothing else

seems to work.

–South Pasadena, December 24, 2000