Your wrongs are the world.
All I see
Is my own mockery.
What is love? Tell the world: Stop making fun of me!
This is what you want your lover to do.
The world without love is mocking you.
Your wrongs are the world.
Everywhere you look
Is your fault. It’s your fault you looked there.
You look on your faults. The borrowed book
Is not for you. It tells of others—
Who don’t have anything to do with you.
All the faults are yours, but the others
Also see the world as their fault.
So all they want to do
Is put the blame on you.
The person is not the world,
But the world is every wrong
Which they did, and are.
Wrong accumulates. It doesn’t go away,
And neither do you.
The world is every wrong you decided to do.
The world mocks and teases me.
It’s everyone’s greatest conspiracy,
The sick indignity
Which afflicts us, the same.
Wrong, the sound of your voice,
Wrong, the very choice, and wrong, every sound of your name.
If poetry pleases me,
It’s because, ironically,
I can make fun of you safely;
I can mock you with impunity,
Because the world is me;
Every wrong is mine; poetry
Fools you regarding the words you, them, me.
If you think I was referring to me,
You don’t understand irony, or poetry.
This is wrong. Everything I see is wrong.
But I am good. I am my song.