You haven’t texted
since Saturday,
when I read Keith Waldrop’s

A poem in translation, 
                the young man was fond of saying,
is like the dead body of a foreigner

Some people say sex is like riding a rainbow.
Maybe theirs is.
I say I fall on a grenade each time.

A man walks briskly away from his body
And from feeling slightly sick on a blazingly fall day.
The sky is fresh perfection, without a cloud of illness.

I wake each morning
To the sound of awful coughing   
Coming from the street

Bring back the all-girls boarding schools for pedigreed girls
Where, morning and night, girls dressed and undressed.
Luxurious lawns and trees rode to hounds.

I like to be dead.
That’s what the dead say.
I’d rather be dead than so-called alive.

This is a different sort of space race.
To the stars through adversity!
A right hook to the jaw, and the planet sees stars!

When even getting a haircut seems too much,
And trimming your toenails and fingernails takes too much strength,
When more than you have is what’s required,

That the children slept
In their beds through the night

And much else had not changed