Flat Affect

I'm not old enough

to be world-weary, even if, except for the few

religious ecstatics, every poet I read seems to live

in that dull grey of bathetic morning wilting

into unending night. No, not

when the apprehension of a single hair out of

place makes me want to shave the entire scalp, not when,

late evening, tuning each body part toward the lull of sleep,

still I do not do anything

but stare wide-eyed at the newly turned underside of a leaf

of a thought as my blood – so

much – throbs with such percussion I cannot tell if what

wildly shakes is me, or the bed, or the whole

earth. They say: no tears

but in things; no ideas but in

grief – yet what I read as an eternal dinner with the alcoholic cousin

and his alcoholic wife and their two sick-eyed ugly kids,

having to swallow the inescapability of avoiding the memory

of all of this, that struggle to define the precise flatness of the

soda, is rather a consuming fire

fevering up until where I turn the page

is marked by the char left behind.