THE ARGUMENT

BY

JOSEPH COOPER

“In whose sight all things joy, with ravishment

Attracted by thy beauty still to gaze.

I rose as at thy call, but found thee not;

To find thee I directed then my walk…”

                   (Tr. Roy Flannagan, The Riverside Milton 477)

for love

There are so many things I shouldn’t tell you,

to keep light from passing through,

so many starving thoughts

left naked and unattended.

I wanted to tell you, without having to say you were

an afterthought, and that I am just a writer.

I wanted to fall through the fire covered sky

glittering everywhere like stars,

a naked hostage chasing desperation.

I no longer wish to scratch at the wrong wrists. 

I want to close my eyes and hold my mouth shut

until all my thoughts become caskets

so I can climb over them

and invent new ways of being born.

There’s no easy way to say

that much of me was already

gone when we met

and that I was only a small glass room

divided by fists,

and that nothing you said or did

would replace each individual fraction of a kiss.

We bang on each other’s throats

so that we might be beautiful

once again, so that our hands

become the ugly bedspread

of a broken faucet love affair,

and so that we can say

once and for all

that we might never get used to it,

used to words forgotten and reinvented,

used to the resourcefulness of a literary plot,

used to believing in great escapes,

wishbones, and the lonely road home.

I know that this is only poetry

and that this introduction is inconsolable,

that if we touch with our eyes closed, the cold window

frosted with street lights and lullabies

we might leave the doorframes of dreams

holding our breath listening

to the roar of the freeway, confusing

it with the voice of God.

There are so many things I shouldn’t tell you,

Finding myself sleepless and wanting

to be wanted, knowing that my roots will end

somewhere, knowing that my bones

will run out of footprints.

There is no way to make this story beautiful. 

I only wanted a white room without mystery,

a mouthful of ash, a better story for you

poor, sad, thing, yet here we are

without navigation in astronomical

light, the floor crumbling under us,

desperate violins trilling inside our bellies.

I want more seats reserved for the images of

destroyed lovers so that this story might think

of compassion, not the endless lamplights of

lonesome nights strayed

under the sputtering engine of beaten hearts.

Turn in your chairs and tongue the blades of cold

shoulders, mouths breathing fire in slow

motion young and beautiful.

What could you tell me?

What could you possibly say to conciliate the damned

dog burrowing in our words?

That tonight in bed you will use

my body like a matchbox

striking me with intentional music,

that our prayers will once again

run blind, stripped,

and screaming into the held

breath of a promising melody,

that tonight in bed I should let you

cradle my head

between your breasts

and rest my hand

between your thighs drunk

under the dock of pointless surrender.

I didn’t want to see you this way, profoundly wicked

using my cock as a gear shift asleep

at the wheel, reassuring me

that we’ll shake dreams

from the window seat of the next dull moment.

It would have been nice to hear once more the

immediate mathematics of broken glass,

another argument arrested by cruelty,

and to say that your love

was once mine, intentional,

wandering, wandering in slow motion.

I want to be born into new laughter,

larger than the usual romantic

love, more hysterical than panties

on the bathroom floor, legs

kicking with long division

to translate our dreams,

to have something to call our own.

Tell us life happens every minute,

orange juice and toast, alarm clocks

and punch clocks, and television dreams,

noise in the heating vent like a chainsaw

in the bathtub, and believe me

the speaker has his strategies

and a sink to wash away the blood. 

We want to bend our heads

recklessly into each chapter,

shameful and half-remembered,

leaning against windowpanes in still-

life like the hands of thieves,

singing lullabies in confessionals.

Tell them that our hands are tied

and that pressing our

genitals into the moonlit riverbed

draws instead a lesson from anger

than suspense,

that we will make noise

and dance across the water

lilies of time so we always remember

clichés about karma and regret.

Our bodies possessed by the running

horses of lucid dreams

are among the dirtiest

thoughts you have,

wet as an uncomfortable silence

dismissed under another pretext.

The mystery is not in the sunlight

pouring across your skin

but the feeling of your breath against

my belt buckle. 

I know where those bruises came from,

and I know you cried each time.

I was on the phone with you, sweetheart,

hurtling the unstoppable syntax

of frantic lists, and like you,

I am now eating my tongue on the

university lawn, confessing everything

to ephemeral divination.

If only we held our breath

a moment longer, radios

yearning for transmission,

first words coming

into mouth,

we could have burned down

straw houses

in lieu of something

invariable, unrepeatable

secrets called out

behind our backs.

I want you more than the story

of where the road goes,

the ripped up shirt and

the chain linked fence. 

That is to say, don’t walk away

with clothes clinging to

nipples and groins,

laughing at the unlit map

of my naked chest,

don’t finger the flat, white wall

as if you are waiting for yesterday,

for an hour ago, for this very moment

as if to avert some impact,

some deadly connection with sheer,

manic improvisation,

names savagely shouted from basements,

swerving and crushed under panic,

becoming erotic and life-threatening

until poetry serves the awful

bondage of another disillusioned truth.