The Nature of Desire

Words float down the breeze

to me. Across windowless cold classrooms.

'The nature of desire is such'

he says and I give myself

a cold hard look,

'that it is never ending'.

'The nature of desire...'

I test it on my tongue.

An earthy word, stable,

that settles like dust

on the sensual sound

of 'desire'. Wisdom

perhaps is the greatest

vice, gently pulling you

from side to side, open

to the storms of the world.

Screw this. I don't want

to know. (Who am I kidding?)

To know, to believe, to

understand, and then give way

to yourself to grow. I want to

be wise, and yet I also want to

possess you, and everything you

stand for. And not only you,

and not just in that way. I want

to hold on, desperately,

to every moment, every sight,

every limb of mine desperately screaming

'desire'. I desire beauty. I desire life,

and knowledge, and joy, and youth.

I desire every galaxy, every photograph,

every deep-veined leaf floating in the wind.

I desire - and I sit, on the other side

of the mirror, watching. I sit 

in the eye of my cyclone, listening

to myself think. I lie down 

in a golden field at sunset, and

fashion rhetoric from my words.

'The problem of possession', I say.

'The existential angst'. The grasses

lap like waves at my feet, blown astray

by the wild, wild wind. The sun rests momentarily

on the taut string of horizon, a deep orange orb

against sky.

I languish

in a fragmentary existence.