Pain
To what would I pray for and to,
If not this soft rage?
I can’t get a job, can’t work
The people who give them out, like theoretical candy
They’ve got my name
And I’ve got their toothbrushes

My sadnesses are not profound enough

Can’t make money, can’t make love
Can’t make the grade, the cut
The cult, the butcher, the surgeon

A child in the fields till a dawn of shivering calves fills his belly with doubt
He knows
Plucking an old arrowshaft like a gone violin from the soil

I cannot have
The big star nova cortex eureka from the very wound
No
Mine are the small, mean, petit mal passions
Understanding with a world, a dream, a disease, a nation
A thousand cuts
That I wish would just open and excoriate me
Into the doorways I keylessly know are waiting
For those more gorgeously ruined than I have the strength to be