My Wild Animal Love …

… is lost somewhere in the woods.

It was crying beneath the porch. I left food out for it.

The sound has since moved to the woods,

chimes of white birches whose sound is the sound

of Bach moving like a sextant across a mandolin.

I stare at the edge of the woods, the edges of the sea,

and say, Hold me close, for I have seen something

and am struck with sorrow at how best to leap.

I can hear the nature of the path — it’s somewhere in

the snowy streets of Cambridge; on the beds of Norwalk

or Lowell, balls of rolled up socks being tossed at each other —

it’s in the quick cascade of thunder causing the fireflies to vibrate

like freshly struck marbles. It is an appoggiatura I cannot name, though

I can name this: I already would have been loved 100 times today,

and, knowing this, she calls me to tell me

she now knows how to say, ‘What the fuck?’ in Korean.

But I want her to tell me my

beard looks nice.

I want her to recognize the

fact that my wild animal love

needs wild animal

reassurance, is a concerto grosso.

My wild animal love 

needs a wild ancient one;

to give me something other than 

religion or vampires. Brin me

cannons, in fact; point them at the octave.

Let them have a charity concert called,

‘Save the Staves.’

My wild animal love,

sign your name as the crest of the hill

marking the horizon line,

a name we thread through

the player piano as we hear it go —

Hold me hold me hold me hold me hold me.

Form Letter

Please accept loss on loss, they say. But, no, I say. 

What about God mowing the stars every night? 

Fireflies rendered as grass clippings? She kept asking 

what a clock was from her bed at the hospital, not as

a knotty, gnostic-seeming metaphor, but for real, 

and so I responded for real, and so I will respond for real: 

I think you are keeping your dreams your dreams. 

I will take you at your stated word, but I was not wrong

with what I saw. Please accept, they say, and I say no 

and ask her to come with me to see her in the hospital, 

and she says, No, I want to have good memories of her. 

Three appeals to three different people: see the clock, 

see the dream, see her, see me. Four. Is that the time?

What were you like when you were our age? I was stealing 

hubcaps in black-and-white pretending to be a car. Now, 

I’m listening to David Byrne tell us it’s nothing but flowers 

and I want someone to hold my flowers. It is so hard for me 

to hear my own worth. What do you have against time? I just 

want to be held. I want the hands on a clock to be actual hands

crowdsurfing me down time’s river. I want my fingers to be trees 

and for there to be a wedding ring for each new age. I want more time. 

As for Me,

I would like to step further into the gray zone with you. 

I’d like to treat it as a rocking boat we can see-saw w/

exaggerated steps. I’d like you to be mad at me, horrified

w/me, annoyed with me, ignoring me, gasping for me, 

never speaking to me for weeks, bound up in my sheets like

a river of summertime Austin bats taking a nap — I want it. 

I want you. See my finger pointing? Gently testing the boundary 

of your mouth? I want your weight to test my jaw. Text me, “Gross.”

Text me, “Come here.” Text me. (Born slippy, my slippery ‘you,’

my name the Angel Boy, and I …) want to go to a farm, pick-up 

food for a restaurant, drop it off, talk shit w/ the chef, and then run 

into you — a surprise! — and for us to catch each other up. I want fish 

in the streets. I want to make you paper mache earrings that glow 

in the dark. I want you to be someone else, because why should one 

carry the burden of desire alone? I want you to be famous, a complete 

unknown, a friend, an enemy. I want you to have walked away before 

the end of this poem. I want you to trust the fact that I’m still safe, 

even if that’s me lying to myself. (Watch me cut my own legs out 

beneath me to prove this true.) I want you to leave the supermarket 

with a cart full of lettuce and a malevolent expression on your face. 

I want the Argoses we carry within to be friends and run free …

Why have I been so historically resistant to taking my own advice? 

Maybe because I’ve been held for so long I took that for the weather, 

and as the arms of love bound up with time dissolve into wind, then 

where is this perpetual excess of energy supposed to go?

I want to take you to a bookstore that sells nothing but 

Over the Garden Wall fan fiction in advance of the holiday. 

I want you to keep a seat warm for me on stage.

I want to smoke again, drink again, banish all of that from my life again 

& become someone who goes to the gym at six in the morning every morning. 

I want to bring my cats with me and give them tiny little workout machines of 

their own.

I compromised for years and now I want everything.

I want us to go to Copenhagen for the weekend. I want 

to take you back to Sheffield and show you the rap battles 

I saw myself. I want to learn folk songs from Newfoundlanders

& teach it to the fish while at sea. I want Mardi Gras to live forever — 

to dance past the heat death of the sun. I want us to fuck our way into 

snack breaks and water breaks, maybe even with movie intermission 

music playing. I want our heads to softly marble clack off our shoulders 

as we ramble the streets of Paris or Madrid at dawn. The cracked bells, 

the washed-out horns — I want love to break time and leave it ruined 

in the streets. (And maybe that’s my problem with time; I keep wanting 

love to break it.)

I want to have my ass kicked in a game of pick up basketball in Cali.

I want to have my old college friends laugh as they watch me lose.

I want to fly carpet weavers out from Turkey and Iran, let them 

examine the Pacific Ocean rolling into the shore and ask if that’s 

something they can do, if that’s something they can copy, and they?

They will laugh and say, God willing, and I will laugh and say God willing. 

I want to stand up like Monk at the piano and shimmy around the stage as you 

do your thing. I want nothing. I want my cats to eat regularly and well. I want 

my car to be full of mom’s paintings. I want my dad to be happy. I don’t want 

you

so I can feel seen. I don’t want you so I can feel heard. I want you for you. I 

want you — 

for now — for me. I want to give my wild animal love a name. A raised fist on 

the hillside. 

A fluttering flag whose image none can ever quite see. I want to play with 

counterpoint across poems. I bow. I laugh. I want you, I want you, I want you, 

I want you, I want you.