13 April, 13th NaPoWriMo

I wish I believed in the soul

I wish I believed in the soul
so that I could talk about it
like a real poet. I would
focus on yours, of course,

since I know yours, oh I do know
that soul-ish thing in you
and I love it, too,
though it is omnivorous

like a dog. Like my dog
Arthur Rimbaud, who will
eat anything from cigarette butts,
apt for the French poet in him,

to pine cones to styrofoam
peanuts, apt for nothing and
surely invented by someone else who
doesn't believe in the soul. Above all

he loves to eat every ketchup and
snot-slicked napkin crumpled and
dropped to be stomped on the streets
of New York. He leaps to their gray

with spritely joy and a private furtive
glance he can never share
with me because he already senses
though he's only a puppy

that I do not understand.

How I am: always

How I am: always
the three a.m. call: the big news
that I love you so terribly, the fact
that I hate you so truly. I am
the digital ping of the phone that wakes
your dog, I am the dream broken, the one
where you are sawing off your leg
before an uninterested husband. Too: I am
wholly given up on the caller, have deep-sixed
the bright cotton candy stickiness
of our shared jail time, have let go
the blood hostility like pompoms shaken
in the headlights of oncoming traffic
on the old farm to market road, oh I am all
Buddhist detached oh oh I am the ickle
bit of hope for the caller
tucked in the top drawer behind the socks,
rolled loose like a sock,
the interruption long awaited.

I am the moment beneath the 3 a.m. call,
not the first kiss but the gray afternoon
and the invitation across the fence,
I am the energy of the hop over that fence
and the lope toward the scrotum-tightening sea
and the letter you wrote about it later
and the argument in which it came up
and the future heaped on the door stoop
like your best jacket worn for the date
bleached by salty sand.

Or I am the moment before that moment, the breeze
called spring with dirt and shit and the crocuses
probably, sure, though I wouldn't know a crocus
if it knocked me on the head. Who's there.

I am the reason you think the call is made
and the reason I think the call is made
and the dark cut by halogen, helpful,
because anyway it's 8 a.m. somewhere else
and 5 p.m. in still another town,
and I am the other reason, the one always here,
silent, spinning us round, drunk.