The people I know are sick.
Each moment they worry at their eighty years of
death as if it were a scab.
They have a hundred diseases and a hundred specialists and
therapists to propagate each.
Our conversations are endless: the progress of
bowels and penises and vaginas and stomachs
and lungs and brains and psyches and souls
and nerves and eyes and sexualities and on
and on...
We live in a hospital for the impoverished:
instead of in beds, we lie waiting in our
coffins.
And the internment is killing us: we have shrivelled
with pettiness; even our hatreds are
small ones.
We cannot see out of the window: we spend our
days in individual and collective
psychological attacks.
Kicks and punches are not allowed by our rules
of etiquette.
Death must be slow: we want to live.
Mornings like these, I would embrace Reagan
and Andropov like brothers, if for one
moment my hatred could blossom, as beautiful
as a mushroom cloud.
The people I know are sick, and I write sick poems.