He doesn’t believe in fate

He doesn’t believe in fate
I don’t either
I believe in a kiss between me and his
Moustache
The serpentine dance all night in the inky blackness
I am an absolutist, because I came to be in Bush’s time
Which is a time of good and evil, not fate

It happened when we were young

It happened when we were young
But we were never young
It happened before we fell in love
But we never fell in love
You turned your back to me
And there was a haze
No, it was a glow surrounding you
That I pierced through with my cape
Before you were young
You were an old man I cared for
While the sickness enveloped your brain
We couldn’t remember each other’s names
But it was so fun when we were surrounding each other
You were so fun when you got old

Who did you kiss?

Who did you kiss
What did you do
I had a dream
That you loved her better better
Than me
You always
Love them better than me
You have never loved me
Since the day you met me
Outside the barn
You said you were happy
I wasn’t happy!
I wasn’t happy!
I was dreaming of things
We never were
Dark-haired man in South Carolina
In a hot tub
We never were that
I still see the person
I thought you were
And want him
For one night
I wanted him
Who are you
Who did you kiss
Why did you kiss me
Why did I kiss anything
Kissing
Is over
Blackness is
Done
Darkness is dread
Is Done
Darkness is gone forever
Love, no you are no love
Love, no you are no love
You are nothing
Blackness to dread
Horrible thing
That is ugly
Ugly at every angle
Ugly in every light of day

You are beautiful
(with Thom Donovan for Deadpan)

You are beautiful
But you are also heartbreak
Locked forever frozen in time
A cry I cannot get out
No matter how much I grease myself
With honey
Pink palette of grapefruit, the book on the shoulder
Of the room, the rose gardens
But I do not want you to be so
I want to be spilling forth with the acid yellow honey of the bees
O love, take me thusforth
Into your secret places
I will never travel
I will never wake
You are more than heartbreak, you know
In your fanciful suits and closing sighs
You are more than the shining blue room
On the afternoon of the date, the cold bite
You are the hot breath too I take myself into
The hot red fruit I take myself into
The living breathing thing I take in, I want to
Be a watery nymph in a wooded grove
With you
I want to be a cloud so full of honey
That there is nothing left of me
Until I throw myself into the fire
And am contained forever
I will be contained forever, a thing of beauty
Forever
I will be that thing forever
I don’t want to be beautiful with you
I want to be an ugly, wretched, bleeding thing
Poring out on the windmills
I want to be the locked tiger they can’t lock up
Until it murders and then rages through the fields
Of wild grasses
I want to be so wild they can’t lock me up
Put fences around me to pen me in
I will be so full of fire that they won’t be able to extinguish me
Before the beauty comes I want to be so full of fire
That they can’t tell me from you, my wretched angel
Sweet animal, they locked us in this life
But I think we still have time before we have to get out of it

None of it matters

None of it matters, lost one
In the world
None of it matters
I went from water to waterfall
Green world to red world
I went from a world full of deer
To a world full of bears
The tissued world
To a world that was off set
I set the curtains
They said, Set the curtains
So I set the curtains
I spent August in bed
In the same clothes
I kept on the same clothes
For ten weeks
I changed my outfits
Five times a day
And no one listened
I got lost, I got found again
I was always lost
I will always be lost
I will never win at this game
I will never
Be the speaking thing they made me to be
I am not pronouns
Nor am I all of them
I am no I
I wander
And it doesn’t matter
I stay the course
I am a star-filled night
Among the unforgivable
I live within a grey world
Within a pretty one
Within one they made for me
I help you find your books
I made the books
I made them, world I held within me
It was no help
I looked at the world with dark eyes
In front of a grey house
I was always lost
In that house
I was always lost, a zero
Am I lost for good?
Shoot I don’t know
Mathematical laundress
Of the forgotten egret
I am
Glue me to ten sheets of paper
So that my skin sticks upon them
Write six blue letters upon my skin
I am all object
Throw me around the sky
And I will glisten, a red ball
Floating over buildings and boats
And the sun itself
Hang me on the moon
I am funny-shaped so far away
Stick me where the bunnies go
Let me lay there with them
And those awful ears upon me
Who knows within them
The secrets I will tell  

Dorothea Lasky’s first book of poems, AWE, came out in the fall of 2007 from Wave Books.  She is also the author of Tourmaline (Transmission Press, 2008), The Hatmaker’s Wife (Braincase Press, 2006), Art (H_NGM_N Press, 2005) and Alphabets and Portraits (Anchorite Press, 2004).  Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, American Poetry Review, 6x6, Crowd, Parcel, Fou, Typo, Octopus, Glitterpony, and Satellite Telephone, among others, and her work has been featured in Poets & Writers, Bitch magazine, and The Philadelphia Inquirer.  She is a graduate of the MFA program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and also has been educated at Harvard University and Washington University.  Currently, she lives in Philadelphia, where she is pursuing a doctorate in education from the University of Pennsylvania.