Poem-a-Day

Not everything is language, not everything is meaningful. 
Stein got this, too, with her whole digression on nouns. 
A steak can mean anything, are you thinking of a steak right now? 
Don’t. A steak is a carpet, a rope, a canteen meadow. A steak is a stake 
in a fat, black heart. People mistake a close encounter with death 
as a close encounter with God. They caress the edge and the edge  
stinks of holiness. I’ll never get over that we used to be children. 
Our inner lives gathering, gathering while angels disguise 
themselves as a kitchen sponge. Dear angel, I mutter! 
I address the rushing world. I make saints of soda cans and fly north  
in winter. Every person is an address the way every person is a calendar. 
You are a Wednesday afternoon on Rue Etienne Marcel. 
On the last day of May, a soccer game is won and fireworks burst 
in the streets. Young pigeons, in fright, flee a stone church in Belleville. 
Dill is chopped rough into a salad. I am reading about how every time  
we put a new gender into language, we prove the purity of the old ones.  
To oppose a regime is also to reify it as what governs you. I choose  
every day to get up and perform my antics. You are a one woman show, 
a dancing shade said to me at a bar in Brooklyn. I loved someone once
who took me outside language. Have you ever had that?  
It’s a drug. I was possessed with the lingering warmth of a flat puppet, 
recently animated. I said, take me seriously. I said, I can be who you want,  
I being a parakeet or another diminutive creature, squawking far  
from her equatorial home. How tropic. What tropic erotics. 
What I’m saying is there was a lot of language between me and my masters,  
between me and the house of mastery. We pummeled each other through  
the wormhole of signs, we tumbled the other through the tickle of time. 
Sometimes during sex, I see the alphabet smiling at me. 
The letters wear robes and hoods and encircle me like a gangbang  
of monks. They arrange and rearrange, taking their turns.  
I resist the urge to spell.