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I DON'T WANT TO BE WITH WOMAN
1.
I LULLABIED WITH LIES!
I talked a good show!
in motels and transient hotels!
on verminous mattresses!
kept up backyard
gardens in my head!
crazy cozy little homes
of my lust to get laid!
I fucked them into my dreams
with verbal displays!
I hung curtains with my cock
talked autumn in Paris
summers in Rome
sons and fishing poles
picnics and Honda Civics
With my tongue between their legs!
I promised cocktail parties,
life insurance
museum tours
and featherdowns
Everything I thought
a woman could ever want
(a fifties musical happy
ending movie of love)
and to cap it off
retirement on Golden Pond!
and one after another
I watched me
break their hearts
with a raging mouth
of landlord-beaten doors,
phones shut down
and food run out!
I storm-trooped
as they sat
at the edge of the bed
with tears down their faces
clutching their hands
trying to retain composure
while the bombs of my insults
fell like the ravaging of Guernica,
the horses of their pride
reared heads and neighed
screams of dying love,
the skeletal jaws
of their trust yawned
with teeth of trampled caresses,
and when only gutted Maidenforms
was left, they packed up their books
and dresses, Levi jeans and poems,
and left with tired hearts
to pursue their phantom princes.
Now, I don't want to be with woman.
I don't want to cry in their sex
and smile at their pain.
I don't want to kill the mother
in them who is killing me.
I cannot heal the shame of love.
I can only fuck like a man
and love like a boy
because this is what I have
learned to do.
It is what I know.
2.
I am sorry if you loved me.
I don't want to see your eyes
go cold at the end,
when the bedroom of our hope
becomes dreary as London.
I don't want to turn
my back in our winter bed.
All the love we made
in that bed is now a child
named Survival,
rejoicing in the rubble birds
of this morning.
I am looking out from
the porch where we embraced,
watching the sun rise
over Haight Ashbury.
The sun also rises
when love is dead.
It trembles with a quiet, silent light.
And I see that my grief is a child
trapped in the gross decay of my adult.
I ask: what power on earth
can call to health
a mind so steeped in its mistakes?
For, after a time,
you are what you've become,
doomed to die
of the cold inside,
and all the tattered dolls
and rattles decrepit
with time.
My afflicted mind of light
stares from its crib
with the hard finality of bones.
And I ask: what power on earth
can stop the gun
in my head
from going off?
- Alan Kaufman