Poem from One Year Ago Edited Lightly

Wrote this poem a year ago after a random New Year's hook-up. I remember writing it in Lizzy's room about three weeks after the encounter. We had just listened to I'm Wide Awake it's Morning and then people showed up to party and we were drowned out by Bon Jovi. I am pretty sure this was written the night before I presented on Bukowski's feminine ideal for Gizzi. It's obviously sadder, more confessional, and more unashamedly an imitation of O'Hara's aesthetic. Probably am posting it now because Snodgrass died.

-----

Extraordinary blindness now to your own logic!
-Jude the Obscure

A starless midnight settled around the moon
I composed an ode to birth control and
fat mommies WAL*MART fashion sense
another failure
(I'm sure of)
logically sleeping in our own never-ending February
like the beetles of an undergraduate dream

(Dick Clark and the ball dropping)

The girl bobbing across the room
strings banalities like pearls
music, the war, whales
dangle on her
like hooked lures

(Then the red-head, white like those good times)

I have seen the best minds of my generation
blink before the highest heaven
One year and a half ago I screamed at white stonewall
filmed Greg Bem hanging off of it
like a woman in a window
dorms that blew over in the wind
the dust brought them back

(I never learned the clarinet)

my muse is failing
like so many fathers
waves at the beach
seagulls in trash
the squawks like tulips
budding in wintered gardens

(library smiles)
(dirty bubbles in color-changing glass)

I want to tear my soul
from my veins
and smear myself with the cliches drizzling out
war paint, numb, streaking

(I let down Schopenhauer constantly)

The worst kisser ever
moaning on like a hive of
disintegrated nothingness
smelling like
some beautiful, new disease
the dress, some horrible animal
in the green bathroom where
our secretions and sloshed vomit
meshed like blood in a jet, black
flea