The Magnolia

Like a magnolia bent with / excessive bloom was my frail form / burdened with desire. But / you humbled me with coarse words, made / me feel old and inadequate. / I cannot buy youth at any / pharmacist’s. Take yourself away / from the sunny orbit of my life, / impotent male who with a grin / of pride calls himself a sadist. / You have sullied the purity / of my perspective. You have slain / love with knife-thrusts of verbiage. / Have I been perverse till now, drawn / to a small-town symbol of fair / commonness, a Paleolithic / toy made out of clay? Why did / the cranes, their wings agleam, rise / from the ripened rice fields and fly / to dim my landscape and my sky? / Why did a rain of misery / overflow the horizon’s rim? / You could not ejaculate but / I ignored the flaw. You spewed / anger, an orgasm singular / and strange. I owe nothing, I don’t / owe anybody a thing but perhaps / I do owe something to poetry. / When I walk the nights away / sleepless with a tread lighter than / a soul’s, I break the backs of / roaches, the brittle shells of egos, / but that too is a poet’s fate. / Illness and medications sprout / a kind of verse oddly perfect. / One gets only the hell well deserved, / thank God for that. My lover / is a chess piece I must sweep off / the board to bring order where / disorder roams. I shall not have / a heavy hand on my bosom, / a greying head against my knee, / I shall no longer feel thirst or / hunger. I shall swallow gusts of / sweet air and chew down the slats of / yellow, yellow, yellow sunshine...