The Only Corner Left

 
again at night, still a child in years,
through the kitchens my worthless poems drift...
you who read so perfectly
the states of things,
who traced the invisible currents...
you with your black veil
draped over the lamp
when you went searching for your body's cellar,
there in the corner, on the left
the dead-eyed butterflies
and you with your love, your heart's thin pages
imagining some other woman...
you, racing beneath the red lanterns...
when desire quickens, when it rains, when silence dances...
disputing the space that lies between two prayers...


you can do as you please—
all I bring unknowingly
to this paper—shameless!
each poem here is a violation
every fiction the shelter of a masochist
and from it this hunger
for sex-knowledge,
these many insinuating curves
in the rose's cyclic blood...
I think of the common man
crucified on a woman's form,
I think of the red breath
from the nostrils of the stained,
deferring tomorrow...the portrait of
a park with imaginary footsteps!