Gladly Though I Lost It and Knew I Would

This is a community of a handful
four frail humans in a third story apartment
nest of boards slapped together with glass
Aren’t we all fragile, two of us children
I don’t get how we have imagined
our world and it’s imagined us
I’m yellow T-shirt jeans messy haircut
Who told one to have what life from
categories with numbers of stars viz
one star housewife two stars office maybe
three stars professional four
stars and above why that’s famous and
what stars am I? abuser no stars?
But anyone’s an abuser—in mv
girlish depths I’m untouched by
drug or drink but not complicity
in the abuse of the whole substance of a city
or crime of possession that encompasses
the country, don’t we possess, abuse it
together, this country from which we abuse
the substance of the world?
So we—not you—live in a treehouse
I have them to love, can’_t see far beyond
but I say, Help me write, to the words
and the words say, Here are the words
because the words love me and not you
I found them where there was much less abuse
in this dark and electric light-sea
no-water sea of much salt blown in freely
for sagacity and pain-in-wound and drying up
light’s drying up he’s almost overstayed his
term of abuse

 
And do I misuse my time saying
Give me some more words please
You know you can’_t run
the world from here he says
you don’t write like
the fuckers like—and
isn’t that good in the longer run
of mysterious currental change
flowing from the future alive now, you?

 
In our apartment we have imagined
a world which abuses much less
and imagined his encroaching death
or did we forget to imagine that, did we
imagine our affection only, “our best work”?

 
We were tenderness, as small community
and more that than any way we fucked up
god knows there’s so little “So little
tenderness in American poetry” as
Robert Duncan once told me—who was he?
Who was anyone? unstarred brightest equality

 
We rejected power in the third-story nest
and so we had tenderness
but no sense or money you might say
sense that’s what they say and so

 
tenderness
doesn’t fail
real life needs only
so much power takes
only a bit
to make a presence
a word or two
on paper
like

 
 
“gladly, though I lost it, and knew I would”