Dear Y.

What are you doing? Everyone I know is drunk. Everyone Iknow died. Everyone I know told me it would be all right but he had to write his mother-in-law for the go-ahead on a meal ticket. He drives it to school everyday. 

As a boy (who destroyed his eyesight
Reading in the dark by flashlight)
I went to the library

The Museum of Modern Art isn’t hungry
Each wall is perfection
Leger says hello to Picasso

In a free country I would be shot for my thoughts of you.
Where thought was free as radio waves
       my mind would broadcast your outrageous beauty.

They take out all the parts marked X. You watch this in a mirror above the operating table. You never knew you had so many parts marked X. 

If you put one leg
ahead of your body
balance on it and swing

On May 11th, 1943, my father, terminal,
hugged me at home in a New York blackout
and kissed me in his bathrobe goodbye forever

There will never again
be this driveway
of fresh snow, one pair

Now he is embarrassed even to ask her for a cigarette. His mother would not have refused him, but his mother doesn't smoke. Neither does he. It was only a pretext.

honing their teeth
on the current
that is always against them.