If I asked Rimbaud and Mazer,
“Are things alive?” I’m sure they would say, yes.
But if Baudelaire
heard them, he would say, “I don’t care.”
And so all philosophy depends
on the wit and timing of quotations and friends.
The room was so cold the pain from the hot water
lasted but an instant. I used the faucet
of your kisses a lot.
I use metaphor instead of plot.
Have you remembered me already
as too extravagant? Wasn’t I ever steady?
Don’t answer that. You are old and the room was cold.
Lyric poets will say things like,
“My toothbrush will miss me. I hated to throw it away.”
How do the microscopic creatures feel, the poets wonder,
when they go out with the trash in winter?”
Unreal is only a kind of sensitivity
that goes too far.
Everything is real except certain instances
of what you—tenderly—are.