Want
I want to say I want but I never say it often enough,
not fast enough, not even in my sleep when words
are slow as dreams, and twice as heavy.
I want to want like Lorca, his heart an open window
where the sea is always at arm’s reach, where
bullets fly
barely missing his heart, and singing.
Want is something beautiful, like wanting Granada
where silence is the secret language of water
and everything is thirst and thirst is poetry.
I want to be somebody’s Kagemusha,
a stately shadow whose devotion is shameless,
rippling like a thousand banners in the wind.
I want to pop open the violet poison of youth
and hope the epilogue still finds me in the arms
of my fatal outlaw.
Instead I wake up alone, the coffeepot whistles
like Sicilian street boys and pretends this is all
in character, this wanting and this loneliness.
I do not want to be the old man who lives
in the
apartment beneath me, who shuffles up the stairs
with his bag of
liquor and magazines
and his face
of frozen disbelief.
I know he will die with his sadness
staring at him, wagging like a dog
that waits and waits.
To want is not advisable if you are a Buddhist,
to not want is just as bad, your mind stretched
across the firmament of longing which is too big
to escape, like capitalism or the internet.
I only want your hands, how they ache sometimes
because you work too much and the world
does not reward
want unless it creates want,
deep want,
for someone else.
I want all this want to implode,
to find the elementary particle of want
in a great big bang, the world an angelic desire
about to unfold in the first sound of Let or Om.
Let there be hearts strong enough to know what want
is,
oh my God I want to fill the big black void of sorrow,
the oversized heavens, and walk away with this silence
still burning in me, like a soul.
