Love Hurts
Sometimes I think I must have imagined it. It was like one of those direct-to-video action movies with Bruce Willis or Nicolas Cage – blah blah, pow pow. We tugged at each other, tumbled against each other, sucked, rubbed, writhed, moaned. I was bleeding so severely afterward, my bottom lip split open, my eyebrow practically torn off, that I almost passed out. Instead, I knew without knowing how I knew that all things were the same thing to the dark.
My mail comes mostly
from desperate individuals,
some who just rage at me,
some who sigh or complain,
some who abjectly beg.
It can get pretty tiresome.
They all want to know how?
Why? When? What for?
Etc., etc.I used to reply
in person, but bad things
inevitably ensued: virgin sacrifice,
crucifixion, burning at the stake.
Next time, Jesus brings a shotgun.
A police van
has been
overturned
and the Burger King
on the corner
is burning,
and if you
absorb
the oily black
smoke,
willfully
breathe it in,
your heart
muscles
will seize up
and your family
desert you,
you’ll forever
be marked down
in the book
as a looter,
an arsonist,
a so-called
“outside agitator,”
who made,
for a time,
this murdering
old world
to tremble
THE FOG’S VACANT STARE
Our textbook compared
the heart to a furnace.
Blood provided the fuel.
Or maybe the brain did.
I can’t remember.
We used to get stoned
before class. The teacher’s
wife and baby daughter
had died in a fire.
I think of it sometimes
as I’m falling asleep
or just walking along.
Don’t ask me why.
______________
LOVE IN THE AGE OF THE COMPUTER VIRUS
In a foolish instant
make all my documents
disappear
______________
OMEN
On the other side of the glass,
it clings to the feeder,
petty lines and shadows
climbing its back,
and when I move without permission,
it swivels its head,
the executioner’s black hood.
I would phone the police,
but I know they won’t come
and would only blame me
if they did
and when I tried to explain
to them that nothing was missing,
it would sound like a lie,
and they would look
from me to the woman
seated at the table
with her head bowed
as evening quietly trembled
and recomposed the shadows
of unseen things.
An old man with eyes like dead sparrows
is telling a story at the next table
in the restaurant of the Quality Inn
in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, something
about the price of scrap metal after the war.
Suddenly he lowers his voice. The Jews,
he mutters. My wife and I look at each other.
Meat hooks. Gas chambers.
Our daughter notices. What? she asks.
I shake my head. We finish eating
and go up to our $74-a-night room
and all lie on one bed and watch TV.
The studio audience is laughing.
It’s been a season of rainouts
and incurable diseases.
The bullpen under water.
The shortstop drunk on the field.
The manager fills out the lineup card
by drawing names in the air.
You push through the turnstile
like a lifelong fan regardless.
But better hurry and find your seat,
or you won’t see the pitcher
standing behind the mound
between warmup tosses
with his head bowed, weeping.
From the series HEARTLESS
1
Friends forget my birthday. Forget they’re friends.
Betray confidences without giving their names.
Change their names without telling me.
Slice the heads off birds.
Leave headless birds on the doorstep.
And when I’m near,
drop their voices and whisper into the phone.
My heart eats a hole in itself
just big enough to escape through.
2
It’s a law no one follows.
Even so, they pull me from the line
and quote Kant’s Categorical Imperative
and then laugh at my discomfiture.
One of them looks something like my older brother,
the same brown eyes and ironic manner.
“Just tell what happened in the order it happened,”
my heart blandly advises.
I would, but all I can recall at this distance
is a car honking for me to come out
and the moon being lynched from a lamppost
and not enough light.
3
Her heart moves in
with my heart.
At dinner she stares down
without appetite at the roses
clotting on the plate.
I ask how her day was.
She shrugs – her heart
doesn’t consider
languishment and pain
to be subjects
for dinner conversation.
But sometimes it wonders
just what took place
before it got here
that night trembles
under the table,
waiting for scraps.
4
I had bad teeth in the dream,
just as in real life, but in the dream
I had the long, droopy moustache
of a gunfighter to disguise it.
I walked so slowly up the tree-
lined street I appeared lost.
People had stopped mowing their lawns
or playing with their dogs to watch me.
A few even pointed.
Perhaps they were wondering like me
what was in the grocery bag I was carrying
that the bottom had turned a greasy black,
my heart or someone else’s.
True, but wouldn’t you rather
jerk awake to the tom-tom of heartbreak
and later, if the light is right,
watch a river scratch itself until it bled?
And as to the example of those who keep
their feet firmly on the ground,
like a telephone pole, or a feeding trough,
or a tombstone –
when you’re in love, you’re happy to board
the wounded plane last seen disappearing
over the mountains and never heard from again.
True, but wouldn’t you rather
jerk awake to the tom-tom of heartbreak
and later, if the light is right,
watch a river scratch itself until it bled?
And as to the example of those who keep
their feet firmly on the ground,
like a telephone pole, or a feeding trough,
or a tombstone –
when you’re in love, you’re happy to board
the wounded plane last seen disappearing
over the mountains and never heard from again.
Rusty Truck 