About to turn this shit in. Thoughts?
“Lust for Life”
I am tasting the backs of my hands
so that I will know them as well as anyone,
leaning drunken on the greasy seat
of a speeding Boston taxicab in Autumn.
My friends are beautiful and cruelly
mine. I want to taste the backs
of their hands, invest my body in them
like a vine. We are swaying slightly, all of us together
as if air were running water and we’d
-
all jumped in. The driver’s never had a drop,
Not on purpose, he assures, I just don’t.
It is only an absence to him, not a presence or
an abscess. It is part of the clean
wound of his existence, ours burning
and twisting before him in earnest. There are
-
too many bodies in the angular seats,
and we’re wading through a test run
in the sweating city’s wake, in hurdles as if
we were strong enough for herding sheep
like real bodies of the earth who tend the ground.
-
Kansas children are screams on a string.
We wonder if that was the abscess, the thing.
Well, I wonder. And the voice
-
on the radio croons, someday our children
will listen to this song and say…
-
Someday is like a dull perfume,
and it’s waiting for us to walk through
to the party. The company is mixed and angry
with a tapped keg and a hollow album
coming at our grinding, bony tips,
a beat that’s burning like an oily pit,
and isn’t asking anything
of anybody.
