To forget is to remember something else entirely
blankness has the feel of endlessness,
we cannot say how deep the coin falls
until it hits.
So forgetting is to say there is something on the other side,
a bottom to echo from.
Sometimes I forget things I never knew.
I exist in the darkness,
falling before there is ever a bottom.
The way you catch something in the corner of your eye
and spin to find
the street emptier than you left it.
She visits still too much, dressed in aromas
of fir needles, mango, mold: I still get lost
knowing she’s close, me not getting younger
or more conscious. Sometimes I fantasticate
I’m broad awake: her witchy presence waits
for me to jump into her arms, but then she’s just
an incoherent ache in sleep’s freaked scenes.
I feel her frosty nitrogenous hands and wrists
vaporing nooses around my head and feet
and genitals, conjuring my drab hair
into a party bowl of oiled, desirable locks.
She makes me nervous, but what would I do
without her? So long as I can’t have her,
I want her and this alarming manic frequency.
Then again, who wants to wake to change,
its pulped, smelly suit of meat, drawing flies?
My night-watch hot girl, moon-maiden, mom,
let me get just one night’s sleep without regret,
released from your foxy ticklish fondlings,
your latest smell of windblown fresh-cut grass.
-W. S. Di Piero
