To taste your own mouth and find it foul,
to look into your own eyes and see a querulous stranger’s,
to find the world either too fast or slow,
to think—knowing you will think, but never know.
No one truly likes who they are.
We are infinitely lost beneath an intemperate star.
What can possibly happen between you and me?
My self-hatred stretches to infinity.
You cannot come between me and it—
this nightmare, this pathetic fit.
Keats rejects the poet, asks for a sumptuous meal.
I hurried to this place, and now don’t know what to feel.
After writing this poem I will do
something unpleasant—the only grace is
I won’t tell you what it is.
My poem is chaste—and in the past.
It’s prior to me. Me? I’m not going to last.