Feminine Soliloquy
If my dreams were lost in time
as books and clothes,
my mind also went down the line
and infused with other longing
of a desperate sort, a sexual kind
of nightmare developed where every breath was
aimed at another man, who did not know
it, until I informed him by letter
And said nothing. As delusions lift off
I see I paid an ultimate price
and left in loneliness, nervous shaking
wracks day and night with residue.
It’s impossible to make clear.
I wanted something, someone
I could not have, until I began
to sound like him, imitate him
at his shy insistence from a distance.
A Venice where floods of onanism took hold.
This self-indulgence has not left me.
Normal relations seem mild.
I am drowsy and half-awake to the world
from which all things flow.
I see it as growing old
if only the price paid were not so great.
And what I wanted wanted me.
But it cannot be.
I wished these things since I was twelve
and the more impossible, or resistant
to the need, the deeper hold they had on me.