And if my heart be scarred and burned, 
The safer, I, for all I learned; 
The calmer, I, to see it true 
That ways of love are never new— 
The love that sets you daft and dazed 
Is every love that ever blazed; 
The happier, I, to fathom this: 
A kiss is every other kiss. 
The reckless vow, the lovely name, 
When Helen walked, were spoke the same; 
The weighted breast, the grinding woe, 
When Phaon fled, were ever so. 
Oh, it is sure as it is sad 
That any lad is every lad, 
And what’s a girl, to dare implore 
Her dear be hers forevermore? 
Though he be tried and he be bold, 
And swearing death should he be cold, 
He’ll run the path the others went.…
But you, my sweet, are different.

Spring in Hell and everything’s blooming.

I dreamt the worst was over but it wasn’t.

Suppose my punishment was fields of lilies sharper than razors, cutting up fields of lies.

Suppose my punishment was purity, mined and blanched.

They shunned me only because I knew I was stunning.

Then the white plague came, and their pleas were like a river.

Summer was orgiastic healing, snails snaking around wrists.

In heat, garbage festooned the sidewalks.

Old men leered at bodies they couldn’t touch

until they did. I shouldn’t have laughed but I laughed

at their flesh dozing into their spines, their bones crunching like snow.

Once I was swollen and snowblind with grief, left for dead

at the castle door. Then I robbed the castle and kissed my captor,

my sadness, learned she was not a villain. To wake up in this verdant field,

to watch the lilies flay the lambs. To enter paradise,

a woman drinks a vial of amnesia. Found in only the palest

flowers, the ones that smell like rotten meat. To summon the stinky

flower and access its truest aroma, you have to let its stigma show.

You have to let the pollen sting your eyes until you close them.