Give me what I want. There is enough
For me. I want to simply love.
But all of us are puritans. We deny
The one who wants to simply love.
Is there such a pitiful supply
Of lovers? Who need love? Why?
And tell me, why did I
Love the unlettered Alpha,
And make the lettered Omega cry?
Omega loved, and wrote
Poems, weeping over a quickly written love note.
God! Every Alpha epistle was pissy,
In brief emails she rebuked me,
Meanly and selfishly.
Selfish Alpha was the world to me,
Because the world doesn’t give
To the world what the world wants. Wanting is how we live.
Alpha had it all: youth, beauty; she didn’t need
The love which those who want love need.
But that was OK. She gave me what I wanted.
Her body was a passive house I haunted
With my desire. Oh my desire
Had nothing to do but burn.
And her house never caught on fire.
But Alpha, as all eventually do,
Came to puritanism, too.
These old trees have seen it all.
Love in the spring, grief in the fall.
What is it the poets need to say?
What we want we can’t have right away.
Alpha turned proud and strove to write.
Her ink became my darkest night.
Give me what I want. And I will give to you
What Omega the poet wishes for too.