Go Long

Last night, again,
you were in my dreams.
Several expendable limbs were at stake.
You were a prince, spinning rims,
all sentiments indian-given
and half-baked.
I was brought
in on a palanquin
made of the many bodies
of beautiful women.
Brought to this place, to be examined,
swaying on an elephant:
a princess of India.

We both want the very same thing.
We are praying
I am the one to save you.
But you don't even own
your own violence.
Run away from home--
your beard is still blue
with the loneliness of you mighty men,
with your jaws, and fists, and guitars,
and pens, and your sugarlip,
but I've never been to the firepits
with you mighty men.

Who made you this way?
Who made you this way?
Who is going to bear
your beautiful children?
Do you think you can just stop,
when you're ready for a change?
Who will take care of you
when you're old and dying?

You burn in the Mekong,
to prove your worth.
Go long! Go long!
Right over the edge of the earth!
You have been wronged,
tore up since birth.
You have done harm.
Others have done worse.

Will you tuck your shirt?
Will you leave it loose?
You are badly hurt.
You're a silly goose.

You are caked in mud,
and in blood, and worse.
Chew your bitter cud.
Grope your little nurse.

Do you know why
my ankles are bound in gauze?
(sickly dressage:
a princess of Kentucky)?
In the middle of the woods
(which were the probable cause),
we danced in the lodge
like two panting monkeys.

I will give you a call, for one last hurrah.
And if this tale is tall, forgive my scrambling.
But you keep palming along the wall,
moving at a blind crawl,
but always rambling.

Wolf-spider, crouch in your funnel nest.
If I knew you, once,
now I know you less.
In the sinking sand,
where we've come to rest,
have I had a hand in your loneliness?

When you leave me alone
in this old palace of yours,
it starts to get to me. I take to walking.
What a woman does is open doors.
And it is not a question of locking
or unlocking.

Well, I have never seen
such a terrible room--
gilded with the gold teeth
of the women who loved you!
Now, though I die,
Magpie, this I bequeath:
by any other name,
a Jay is still blue

with the loneliness
of you mighty men,
with your mighty kiss
that might never end,
while, so far away,
in the seat of the West,
burns the fount
of the heat
of that loneliness.

There's a man
who only will speak in code,
backing slowly, slowly down the road.
May he master everything
that such men may know
about loving, and then letting go.