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It wasn't so different from poetry, the arrangement
of tea candles on scoured porcelain countertops
or shaking old linens and choking
on a sudden cloud of harried, haunting dust motes.

Some days, I still cling to the idea of real poets as deities,
thin and lacey with heavy eyelids
and cigarette filters staling in old china,
dead and not remembered very well at all.
I want to be remembered reveling in
and wearing solitude like skin,
seeing patterns in the drapes and
it's all I can do some days:
spitting words to the surface of old envelopes,
or in ink, on my hands,
solitary sexually charged, itching
at the euphonious shrapnel working its way out of me.

I live that way in a sterile, sleepy mind of a place,
spent on pouring bleach like syntax
and I never said I was a real poet.

I write untrue things because the lies are clean,
smell like vanilla bourbon and are long-limbed;
they are strung-out and cultured with hands that are soft,
and know how to play music and paint.

Those hands are never red and small,
burning in ammonia or vinegar.