Monday, November 20, 2006

Eek

MY NIGHTMARE

My nightmare isn’t falling or even falling

naked with strangers amused

by what I try each day to hide,

this biology of strangeness,

no, my nightmare isn’t forgetting

my pants because that sounds

suspiciously like fun

or at least some sort of joyful malfeasance

orchestrated in rain

while dogs bark manic interrogations

in the night and buckshot

rings through the dark

and I’m singing your name

to some randomly selected forgotten god.

To be distracted by pleasure

isn’t my nightmare

but it once was before

all the cartilage inside us

hardened to bone

and I marveled at your one ear

you never allowed

anyone to kiss, not even me,

and maybe that was

a kind of nightmare,

that refusal. No one ever warned me

to fear my hands

but they should have

known the things they would do

or not do. The knobs turned and knots undone

because there is

pleasure in erasure.

Once you let me watch you

bathe, the tub sudded

with lilac soap

and we hardly said a word

as the water cooled

and the soap fell

away from your skin like a shoal of clouds

and you were new

and unknowably clean

and beside you I failed

to dream of anything else.

2 comments:

sam of the ten thousand things said...

I really like this work. Powerful lines in the middle, especially:

or at least some sort of joyful malfeasance
orchestrated in rain
while dogs bark manic interrogations
in the night and buckshot
rings through the dark
and I’m singing your name
to some randomly selected forgotten god.

Thanks for posting.

M. Shahin said...

Wow! I really can't say anything else. This is excellent, and that is an understatement. Okay, I also thought it was a fun and quirky love poem, and it is very hard for me to like love poems. I'm very selective in that respect, but this was great - another understatement :-)