At the end of my feeding-tube, I didn’t realize
that to stay anywhere on the earth’s surface is to bleed:

Who else understood? Your edgy, defeated laugh?
The modest, unhopeful evangelism of your final appeal

You have a raspberry silk suit.
May I fuck you in it?

“What changed? Same maisonette in West London,
the straight shot of Talbot Road, held onto in spite of everything—
one’s original intended went away, someone else eventuated—

I dropped my new shoes in the stream, thinking perhaps
They would get there before me, like two drowned Jews
Trundling along the seabed to Jerusalem. My immigrant parents lost patience and thrashed me.

I could only guess that the blade leapt out
to protect them, like a strong father his family.

I picked up just enough politics to frighten my mother,
and the slick, witless phrases I used about girls
were a mixture of my father’s and those I remembered

The end of autumn
unfolds in a series of textures and places:
rough towels, the laundry

A girl reclining by an open window
I do not say this was
the only thing one saw that day.

Confused sentences sweep across
the windshield. Then nothing but white
commas exploding out of the night’s