“When I Talk to You” Poem

At the time I wrote “When I Talk to You” I didn’t yet know it was a love poem.

That was of course absurd. Everyone else knew. “Oh, you’re in love,” they said. “God no,” I replied, “We’re just old friends.”

It seems strange that a person could be in love and not know it, but where love was always laced with live rounds and razor wire, the coming of a truly gentle soul can pass unrecognized: A long dial tone in the night, an unsettled plain, no landmarks.

Many people, especially hurt people, miss it. They turn away not knowing who or what they met, too blind and confused to take their one shot.

Certain good, unwary women tried with me before, searched my eyes for what they knew they needed. Sometimes they pretended to themselves that they saw it. I was a smart, alluring kid. I looked like a catch.

I couldn’t be caught, not really. I was too small. There was too much blood in my eyes, too many ghosts under my chair. Offer Bach’s Cantatas to a child and he’ll turn his proud nose up without a thought.

“When I Talk to You” was my attempt to describe a night I didn’t understand. Years later, I still don’t understand it. It was a night of omens, of breakage, of rebirth.

A boulder crashed my delicate pool. An electric yoyo snapped its string and shattered the chandelier. Somehow this was all for the best.

To say another word would be to antagonize the gods of my peculiar race (poets).

When I Talk to You

When I talk to you,
no drunken script
but un-slurred words
shudder newborn
into the plain room,
and you laugh.

When I talk to you,
a sea turtle slips
from the abyss, and
extends his fragile neck west
as if to pray.

“What is it?” you ask as you

tap your cigarette against
the hard Hollywood dawn.

“Nothing. Let’s go to bed.”

And then, in your sad soldier’s voice,
here in the unbandaged day,
which has turned on us like a
battalion of infantrymen:

“I have always loved you,
and always will.”

When I talk to you,
I might be the priest of
some improvised
congregation, suspended
between high rises,
adrift.

I might be a cattail lit
by the moon,
floating the
dead woods,
stoned.

It might be in the
condo of some
ghost virtuoso —
Chopin, Ecstasy, sex,
snakeskins, arterial dreams,
destructible only by
a parade of ordinary days.

And we cling to the
sorry afterparties
of this once magic city.

When I talk to you,
I know nothing, only imagine
what mute fires
sear your hobo’s heart.

Something in me says,
“Go, scar the skies.
Let your savage beacon
guide you on.”

When I talk to you,
bang bang bang,
shattered levee,
shooting star,
mad, silent tears.

Go.

Dash to edge of the world condemned,
you guard of lost caverns.
No evil will steal
the ore of this mountain.

Every tunnel is abandoned now
save your laugh.