The Wake

i want
to find this out

As if I could

hunt you down
spell you out

there must be sections
spaces
ways & means
for people
like
you & I

did I look all right
was my speech all wrong
drowning, drowning
In a sea of polite indecencies
I feel like I’ve fallen behind

as if it were a race
or some other spiral
right out of time

will you
wait for me
can you bear to promise
the strangeness of
all of that

The library, the library
I had said I was going to the library
but now that seems all wrong.

I do this all the time,
you know?
over thinking, reanalyzing
as if in life there were only one right way
& I was the one forced to find it.

Yet, yet
you have that new life too
the difference, the past tenses
Did your parents,
buy you that apartment?

where is the ways and means department.

love is such a thrushing
(at least I know
I was
right
about the dorms)
I can feel the concept spilling

but anyway,
I was going to say,
what I hope will be real someday

To find a man
that will look at me and say
I love you
love you
perfect,
the true image outside myself.

My life, my life
the pasts, the truths, the way it has been

Neither the God
Nor the Devil
could make me change it
back.