Inspired by a Line by Paul Celan

Betrink dich und nenn sie Paris

Each day I wake feeling I’ve already failed.

Tonight let’s get wrecked and call it Venice.

A woman I loved lied that she was healed

and for a night until waking, we were. I was born

with a mortgage, now show me the house, the home,

slip me the dose that’ll make me care less. I wake

each day feeling I’ve already torn

what I meant to rethread. (Did anything seem

in Eden, or was it all its own is?)

There was that woman, so enlisted in life,

one of passion’s true recruits, Love, I said,

I am so bad at loving, and the usual biz

ensued — scenes, loss and its isotopic

slow-fade, never done. On the deathbed of the skeptic

where he slept each night of his dying life

he said, It was hard having so little skin-to-skin

with the world—but look on my works!
with the world—but look on my works! Venice

is sinking, and it might be the case

it was never the key at all. Said a small voice

in the cirrus of a dream, Love is its own abode.

Not sure what it meant, though I think I knew once.

There is some cold road that you must renounce.