AFTER AMY

(AS IN LOWELL ) NEW POEM

power ballads will not save me. thanks, though. yr pageant of rarefied expenditure, big hair, belting one out to the back. i wake up boiling with rage, don’t u? a wormy black truckle of misery. a shiny-solid puck of pain behind the ribs. call it grief, if u like, some load-bearing bariatric noun. all this dirty plenty – big whoop. picture a wild atlantic salmon, hauling itself up the ladder, one mucky rung of water at a time. what for? head-first into the waiting cosh. for what? or, slackly caviared, lathered across gravel, would drag itself open. and die. o, for an exit that isn’t an ending, dear god. the garden, its slough of orange flowers. the sky, its routine blue. the wildly latticing light. heavy-scented stock, those florid avatars of orgasm. the gorgeous daisy’s gauchely perforated eye. to inoculate and mottle. an heirloom rose. fox has an aria, hurled at the low stone wall like a long-stemmed glass. night things, with their tantrums of nerveless thirst, their slick crop of wants – like me, the very scurf of rainbow. no, there’s nothing wrong with it: pastiche and tease, but i will not go on mistaking vertigo for joy. i cannot unlearn, catastrophe sticks to caresses. our sloppy waltz around the doomed and listing ballroom, her slipping tiara of rich, particular moonlight, a look would loosen the wax of yr wings, will end in tears: sweat bees teeming under an eyelid. yes, i want more than the paydirt of dismay, the fleet fact of harm, a rip in the fleshy seam of speech, men, dilating their libel. but neither this: the body a pink bladder of debauch, confection perfected, perfection concocted, a sugary denial of shit – an excruciating meringue. nor their dream of a life: lilies on the window-ledge, pious and culled; a kid on my hip. grown large and white and quietly whining like an obsolete fridge. what do u think utopia is? a kind of heart-shaped swimming pool? its depthless blue digests us. i wake up boiling with rage, don’t u? reinvent the clenched jaw. nailed into the shape of days. angel of evasion, stood at the back, back to the wall.