1. Don’t see him. Don’t phone or write a letter.

2. The easy way: get to know him better.

You fit into me

like a hook into an eye

a fish hook

an open eye

I do not like my state of mind;

I'm bitter, querulous, unkind.

I hate my legs, I hate my hands,

I do not yearn for lovelier lands.

I dread the dawn's recurrent light;

I hate to go to bed at night.

I snoot at simple, earnest folk.

I cannot take the gentlest joke.

I find no peace in paint or type.

My world is but a lot of tripe.

I'm disillusioned, empty-breasted.

For what I think, I'd be arrested.

I am not sick, I am not well.

My quondam dreams are shot to hell.

My soul is crushed, my spirit sore;

I do not like me any more.

I cavil, quarrel, grumble, grouse.

I ponder on the narrow house.

I shudder at the thought of men....

I'm due to fall in love again.

No, I wasn’t meant to love and be loved. / If I’d lived longer, I would have waited longer.

Knowing you are faithless keeps me alive and hungry. / Knowing you faithful would kill me with joy.

Delicate are you, and your vows are delicate, too, / so easily do they break.

You are a laconic marksman. You leave me / not dead but perpetually dying.

I want my friends to heal me, succor me. / Instead, I get analysis.

Conflagrations that would make stones drip blood / are campfires compared to my anguish.

Two-headed, inescapable anguish!— / Love’s anguish or the anguish of time.

Another dark, severing, incommunicable night. / Death would be fine, if I only died once.

I would have liked a solitary death, / not this lavish funeral, this grave anyone can visit.

You are mystical, Ghalib, and, also, you speak beautifully. / Are you a saint, or just drunk as usual?

Strephon, your breach of faith and trust

Affords me no surprise;

A man who grateful was, or just,

Might make my wonder rise.

I feel horrible. She doesn’t

love me and I wander around

the house like a sewing machine

that’s just finished sewing

a turd to a garbage can lid.

Time does not bring relief; you all have lied

Who told me time would ease me of my pain!

I miss him in the weeping of the rain;

I want him at the shrinking of the tide;

The old snows melt from every mountain-side,

And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane;

But last year’s bitter loving must remain

Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide.

There are a hundred places where I fear

To go,—so with his memory they brim.

And entering with relief some quiet place

Where never fell his foot or shone his face

I say, “There is no memory of him here!”

And so stand stricken, so remembering him.

You ask me for a poem about love

in place of a wedding present, trying to save me

money. For three nights I’ve lain

under the glow-in-the-dark-stars I’ve stuck to the ceiling

over my bed. I’ve listened to the songs

of the galaxy. Well, Carmen, I would rather

give you your third set of steak knives

than tell you what I know.

Do not remember me

as disaster

nor as the keeper of secrets

I am a fellow rider in the cattle cars

watching

you move slowly out of my bed

saying we cannot waste time

only ourselves.

She took you the way a woman takes

a bargain dress off the rack

and I broke the way a stone breaks.

I give back your books and fishing tack.

Today's paper says that you are wed.

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

The boys and girls are one tonight.

They unbutton blouses. They unzip flies.

They take off shoes. They turn off the light.

The glimmering creatures are full of lies.

They are eating each other. They are overfed.

At night, alone, I marry the bed.