I Loved Her

They lock the door on their room when they are going to start fucking
and I am grateful a little since I won’t have to walk in
but I never walked in and I don’t want to see their room
so I don’t know why they locked the door but they did.

I loved them some but I hated everyone and I drank as much as I could
and I’d drink shots of gin and throw them up into the toilet
and then drink more because that is the kind of man I am.

They locked their door and maybe they were happy
and maybe they made love
but probably
by five fucking thirty three in the morning they were tired
and there was no one left awake but me.

Yob Tvoyu Mat

What are you going to do with yourself? The question is necessary after a while.
You are poor, you have no prospects, all you have is an amateur education in literature and the ability to say "fuck your mother" in Russian with an atrocious accent.
In this country a man may buy ten or twenty pounds of potatoes for five dollars or a badly made knife for five dollars or a badly made meal for five dollars or he can sell his soul and get a little more. I never knew hate even when I looked into my father, but any hell would have been mine if I could see my own green eyes. In the depths of a cliche I took my mirrors down so that I would not have to see him anymore. I am in every pool of water and I curse the rain when my face splashes by the roadside.

Get Thee To

The tragedy of Ophelia is simpler than that of her love,
because she had no fucking clue what was happening.

Did Hamlet love her?
Once. Perhaps. At least that was his claim.
But he pretended to love her because it was useful-
she never understood that.
He killed her father because Polonius was in the wrong place.
She could have been Odysseus but instead she was Ophelia.

So she dies. And why?
All over a misunderstanding,
Because she was the most convenient woman that he could claim he loved.
He did not want her to die but he did not think about her much
and somewhere between the flowers and the water she knew that—
but trapped on earth with a dead father and a living madman of a prince
she chose the river and it took her home.

Hamlet felt regret for this, or at least that was the lie he told.
Who truly can say what a man feels about a women he has discarded?

He Will Give

I began living in this apartment and immediately wondered when I’d be kicked out. I paid my rent and didn’t stomp very much but I had roommates and it is difficult to predict when someone will begin to hate you. We talked about dying many times but I guess I didn’t take it seriously. We had romantic desires to perish at twenty-seven but I outlived it and I thought he would too. I am laying on the stretch of the carpet where I sleep and it’s the kind of carpet that gets very dark when rubbed one way and very light when rubbed the other so that you can never tell if it is dirty. I had to work when his body was to be visited but I would not have gone anyway. He didn’t like people that were too sentimental. In his obituary they had printed the sentence: “He was a telemarketer.” but he wasn’t, that was just what he did for a living, just that same as I did those three years we knew each other, and those nights of him riding a bike through a college town selling god-knows-what— that was what he did too and a lot of people called him a criminal and of course he was but he was a good person and he was my friend and eventually we all get killed by this goddamn world that wakes up every morning and never lets us hide. He cared about philosophy and literature and music and they called him a telemarketer. What will they call me?