How does it feel
To love someone and despair?
Tell me

Never to console oneself with
Gratuitous reassurances
"If only I'd wanted to"
"If only I'd tried"
Knowing smiles
Lovely alternatives
Taking the carmine-painted hand
Of yet another fantasy in black leather

Please
Enlighten me

How would it feel
To come upon a veil
As resolute and immovable
As Milton's God
Descended like a swarm of locusts
Upon the white-armed form of one's affections

What would it be like
To know that not even a changing of the guard
In the stars
Nor the sudden insanity of the sun, the domain of Ra
Nor a folding of immutable time, bountiful space
Shall drive her into your open arms
Fill your parched, cynical heart
With the sweet fruit
Of ill success

Would you like to know?

Come watch the nightingale sing
Of immutable blackness
Of four pomegranate seeds
And howls from the hallway of leaves

Where some old and spiteful force
Holds her, ignorant and disrobed, far and far
Where desires are valueless
Passion needless
Where love letters are read
And duly answered
In a steel-tipped secretarial hand

What sin
Shall one so callously perform
What sacred duty breach
What lurid rape gleefully enjoy

That this soft, aimless agony
Be the pit and he the pendulum
Higher than men are burnt upon this stake
Kissing corpses

And you, little Orpheus
You thought your quaint music
Would soften the Gods?