Wanting to Live

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The best nights of my small life happened

by accident. We drank beer, went nowhere

and I had never been so loved by boys before.

Never since. Going to college taught me

 

I am not ambitious.

Things rarely go where I mean to throw them.

The great project of my life, for instance, was

to kill myself; look how that turned out.

 

A failure, slick and slow. In the meantime, leaves

became discarded wrappers, boys I loved

applied to college, I learned things

I now forget. How little you can carry on your back.

 

I didn’t mean to want to live, those school nights

we had nowhere to go except not home, but

I couldn’t help it. I loved those boys. Liked living

in the stain where I’d spilled.

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The Others

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1.

 

The pool drinks them

and I am unswerving,

I keep to tile edges.

I’ve been

 

hateful lately.

They are chlorinated.

They are a party

with pale legs

I want to tear open.

 

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2.

 

I keep to the edges of things.

I think I am something

primordial; I ooze.

My bathing suit

 

bunches and stinks, the campus

grows thick with goose shit.

They are one big block

of stinking yellow money.

I am a block, a block.

 

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3.

 

The pool drinks them

with its greedy tile mouth.

Beauty is a story

for little kids

 

and I am big.

No one should have to

be born. The hallway tightens

around them, either I can look

or look away.

     

      

4.

 

We change out of our bathing suits.

I watch their pale legs and fingernails.

They are sheets of blank paper

I want to soak with ink.

 

I towel my hair, my clattering

limbs, the evil places

where my body folds. I watch

the windows shudder and warp

and the hallway tighten, tighten

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