Addiction
Addiction
Original Text
Early Poems (Toronto: Insomniac Press, 2002): 25.
PS 8576 .074 E27 Robarts Library
1I wish we could control this revolting
2want of control: these people
3with their spongy eyes, their mouths
4of trembling shoehorns, billhooks for penises
5and bear traps for vulvas.
6One taste of sunlight and at once
7they can't do without it. Water,
8the same, and food, and air,
9and a dozen other squalid habits.
10Some -- like their copulation,
11a rusting carnation in a cut-glass neck --
12are not physically compulsive but
13the partners can't stop wanting them to be:
14so we desire to be raped
15by love, who would fill us, they say,
16with an oil from the lit braziers of stars.
17What if, doing it every day,
18we resemble pistons, and the slow poison
19cuts our lives off at 70:
20it's the grim determination
21of our passion. And beyond this, even I --
22defended in childhood by my strong father
23the piano and my mother the virtuoso
24from knuckles among warehouses -- even I
25am addicted to the mild light of words.
RPO poem Editors
Ian Lancashire
RPO Edition
2004
Special Copyright
<b>This poem cannot be published anywhere without the written consent of Albert Frank Moritz or the Insomniac Press permissions department.</b>