what to expect when you hate to love, but still do

you will lose yourself and it may look a little like this so

remember the senselessness of your own hands, between

the right and the left, they will turn on you like two teenage

daughters out-moralizing the other for you, the mother body–

one day your left will be at his hip then your right will be

at your face with a hard smack

you will find it inside yourself to walk

outside to shake off your quarreling limbs

you will take the sun as if it were a round mirror and stare

directly and bereft of limbic intervention, divining some power

up and out there but instead your eyeballs will turn inside out

you will have no choice but to take the world by sightless impulse

your knock-knees made off with all your agility

but to you it’s a moonwalk, deeper into the dark

the way night running becomes preternatural flight

somehow the less you can see the more you will

cuss out god whose name resembles his

wife because by now your tongue has become a storm

in your throat, for all the love that you hate is falling rain &

you swallow, and swallow

at this point you may smell him; forgive yourself –

it’ll only be the edge of a had-been forest

fire, or more likely the neighbor’s wood

burning stove, as you really haven’t made it too far

since you encountered his hip, followed by the sting at your cheek from

the memory

of a wife or the oafishness of your tragically backwards feet –

since the savagery of your own

flight of fancy     since the tempest

of your voice could finally unglue

the words           tomorrow, I’ll do better –

photograph by Francesca Woodman / “but does it float”