I AM A TOURIST IN MY OWN HOME

Summer, pregnant, hair all over my kitchen staircase
Smoking was agreeable, we smoked in mirrors

You, as an artist....
We accidentally....

Look, it’s because we castrate,
copulate all we can

Things become soupy,
we buy into some pocket of time

End up in the wrong place
wagging our long tails

Don’t hold up the the symbols
of how much things cost

I am strange in the heart
of this country’s progress-winning dramas

This is sort of about you
Your schemes, your worries in the churchyard

You built a mingled superstructure
on a Christian street

The wood appeared to make a house
The poem, a scene in a building

We bestowed imitations often,
wrote masked, had it all

Eventually the day was not a distance
and we were married

Poor friends, you were weeping,
playing arias in the wrong key

They increased the pills,
citing a winter muddled by church dominion

Post-bloodbath weeding through
my symbols, my dark little vegetables

Generally, cities are sure
about the direction of their death

And laughter attempts
to pursue the sound of rain

You used to let me see your teeth
Living always like you were about to run out of meat

Sometimes parody is lonely
Strange things terrify the poem-maker

Our bleeding speech burdens
Our latex executioners

Early in the world-machine,
war was the curious lover of peace

‘Witchcraft’ lived at the bottom of the cupboard
for use at shadow parties

That silent mourning when James died
Illegitimate, a stray

Watching them breach what we built and
toss our dreams around

Everything I know is crouching bric-à-brac,
fuzzy attractions, earthly, unfamiliar offspring

Nobody nothing I am in the sunny drawing-room
Oh, to have a new identity was my best schtick...

The hands of sleep pantomiming
secret harems, my ongoing lies

I am in future-girlfriend Hell
That’s why I always knew I wouldn’t be good at this

She says the best girls are failures
My failures are, above all, involuntary...

All that time alone in buildings,
thrashing for air

Stealing away with verses
Knowledge is one long institution

And a poem can birth
the downward stairs of Paradise