Another poem, one of my darker ones

Another of the 'list poems' I was experimenting with a while back; I think, the most powerful of them, because of the underlying logic of the progression of images - the way it melds the stalker-ish obsession with lost love into such wider concerns as the artist's constant striving to create something lasting, the hopelessness we all feel in the face of mortality and oblivion, the ultimate vanity of self-assertion.

I've probably said too much by way of introduction again. I had promised myself I was going to try to stop this. Tulsa, reprove me.

See what you think of it.



I Write My Name

I write my name
I write my name in dew on windows
And in dust on table-tops

Once I wrote poems, stories, songs
But now I mostly write my name

I write my name
On the e-mails you delete without reading
And on the postcards I do not dare to send

I write my name in spray-paint
On the apartment building opposite yours

I write my name in semen on your breasts
I write my name in blood on your bathroom wall

I write 'I love you'
I write 'I hate you'
I write 'Die, bitch!'
I write 'Forgive me...'
I write my name

I write my name in letters of flame
A thousand feet high
Glowing across the desert

I write my name
In the sand on the beach
And sit and wait
For the tide