My Maps of Tenderness

He never liked my maps of tenderness.
Even when i showed him the very spot
where he used to sit on wet grass Sundays
at 6:00 AM, he said he'll never talk to me
again and went to write another stuffy
poem on women who gracefully resent Aristotle
but date sophisticated poets like himself. i showed
him pictures of little girls going to boarding school
catching a rare glimpse of the woman in them, and
white horses sleeping in the stables
like babies in dirty hay dreaming of
their egocentric riders and their lame
conversations. I showed him blue convertibles
blowing up halfway to Salt Lake City. Sad women
reading Eliot until the game show's on.
America's greatest poet stranded in a car wash in the
dessert. trouts in a river. Man in his 50s. Bee in your
ear. maps and pictures scattered on the floor. Maps of
tenderness on a brick wall. Come find yourself.

Tiny Grief Song

There is a Modigliani woman
in my serious room. Longnecked,
emaciated, she's sweet but awfully dumb
and brings up memories that hurt,
memories that make us suffocate with
tears over lunch. Men come and go
and fall to their knees touching
their foreheads to her feet in desperate
love they know they'll never get back. One
went as far as taking her life the other
day, and I felt sick while watching him
bury her slim body in the woods. I watched him
change his clothes in the shack by
the pines and spruce up in front of
the cracked mirror above the broken sink with
the busted tap that leaks liquid rust. He wiped the
tears from his psychotic cheekbones, firm and surreal
as he stood in the middle of the woods hoping she'd
love him back. I went to sleep, dreaming of her.

Way Out West

My guest never liked the way
my guest room looks at daybreak. He's also
petrified with colors that make him sick,
that make him dream of poisoned bodies
floating on rivers in his childhood. His wife
hates him too much to cry, too much to let go.
She thinks of flowers and holidays and
always smiles, although we all know she's
just pretending. She likes to tell her friends
that her baby's never been born, although
we can all hear him squeal and ruin drapes
in the other room. She also thinks modern life
is mainly rubbish. they never argue.About anything.
Above all, they love chatting with their gardener,
who looks like forty although he's twenty-five
because his wife is an eskimo and makes
his heart spin round and round and round
His mother doesn't call them very often.
She's too busy dying or something way out west.