On Weekends

I might not wash today. I might

let the weekend slide into gratifying

anarchy. I am supposed to be thankful,

this town is not among the true nightmare

portions of the world. A roof over my head

and quite sufficient shine on the silver,

thanks. I might, though. Haven’t you seen it?

Your city pokes a crafty fang at a ﬂight path.

It’s my city too, I suppose. You think you

are in control. Idiot! To name is to own, not

to know. And now we are so used to blood we

miss the silly crimson pity of it. I dream of

hardmen, the torturer’s tweezers; of scholars

supplanting their teeth in basement gardens.

It’s there, but you miss it. I don’t miss

a thing. It’s always there, the aura before

a seizure, inside my expendable circuitry,

deeper than dog years down, always, even

always. I dream of the made face coming

apart in my hands like wet bread. I might not

dress today. I might suck sauce from the bottle.

Here’s mud in your gloria mundi, and a blue

blowtorch to your extremities, dear. How do

you feel about that? Or the massive enigma

of love? Does anything shock you? I

am supposed to be grateful, the shirt on

my back and quite enough coal in the cellar,

thanks. But a grand mal growls at the back

of the mind, and the back of the mind is

a bottle bank, love. We come and go, stooped

in their palisades. The rich are always with us,

their hexentanz and agonies. Here’s Kate, we all

love Kate, oblivious, bombshell, and didn’t

she used to be us? Not me. Your city, its nicotine

ﬁngers, windows lit, yellow and sickly. Here’s

where we crouch our snouts to the wall. I might

not leave the house today. Haven’t you seen

what’s out there? Their vaunting faith; the awful

punitive spring. I dream of muti and suitcases;

grown men stabbed in their Camden hamlets, eyes

without faces, world without end. It’s there, still

there, but you do not see it. I see everything. I see

it all. And the billy-born-drunks in the house next

door are shouting again. Inadmissible ﬁgments

slurred through the wall.

Notes:

This poem originally appeared in The Poetry Review. You can read the other poems in this exchange in the May 2017 issue.

Source: Poetry (May 2017)