I am not a painter, I am a poet.

Nowadays all the painters are

poets. They caption and comment,

cajole text into layers, corral language

between color. Nowadays it is orange

and ORANGE, sardines and

SARDINES. And I am anxious.

I am neither. Maybe this poem

here needs a slash of magenta,

a flash of fantastic color

scurrying across the page, an image

of words and lines and meaning-

fullness.

I want to write poems filled with beauty

and truth all that rings true and lovely

but it feels late to make things new after all

  

Walking in Cemeteries

Late fall, J. and I would go cemetery

walking, reading out strange names in

morbid freeassociation, soundpoems

rooted in idle afternoons. Ah, youthful

restlessness! Ah, careless youth! Then it

was mere presentiment, an idea. We might

die, yes, but it was hard to believe as

anything other than an image in a poem

by Gerard Manley Hopkins. This is what

I am trying to say: we were not grieving.

Everything added up, even when it did

not. Death was only a word and nothing

more, a scene in a novel, tearstained,

inchoate. The thing that happened to Sylvia

Plath, head in the oven, the sort of choice

no one would make threading through

neat rows, plaques marking the passing

of days and seasons and other lives.

On Tracey Emin’s Drawings (Selected Titles)

First: Illustrations from memory. Another example:

Something thing I am—some things I’m not. Yes, Mrs.

Edwards we wish you were dead. Oh, I am sorry, if I

Could just go back and start again. If I could go back

To remembering 78. She looked like a Turkish Film

Star. I loved her, I thought. MAD Tracey from

MARGATE. She was tied to a pole. And it was

as if she were saying No-No-No-No-No, MAD

Lear from BRITAIN. Nothing going to change my world,

is what she said. And: La La La La La. Ah yes:

Describe myself in less than 20 words. Here we go:

Sometimes the City Feels Strange. There’s different ways

to feeling fucked. No it’s not glamorous, it hurts. Me

Dancing. But: Not just me. No. Not just you.