Dear Lacuna, Dear Lard: Poem by Paisley Rekdal

I'm here, one fat cherry
blossom blooming like a clod,

one sad groat glazing, a needle puling thread,
so what, so sue me. These days what else to do but leer

at any boy with just the right hairline. Hey! I say,
That's one tasty piece of nature. Tart Darkling,

if I could I'd gin, I'd bargain, I'd take a little troll
this moolit night, let you radish me awhile,

let you gag and confound me. How much I've struggled
with despicing you, always; your false poppets, relentless

distances. Yet plea-bargaining and lack of conversation
continue to make me

your faithful indefile. I'm lonely. I've turned
all rage to rag, all pratfalls fast to fatfalls for you,

My Farmer in the Dwell. So struggle, strife,
so strew me, to bell with these clucking mediocrities,

these anxieties over such beings thirty, still smitten
with this heaven never meant for, never heard from.

You've said we're each pockmarked like a golf course
with what can't be said of us, bred in us,

isn't our tasty piece of nature. But I tell you
I've stars, I've true blue depths, have learned to use

the loo, the crew, the whole slough of pill-popping
devices without you, your intelligent and pitiless graze.

Everyone knows love is just a euphemism
for you've failed me anyway. So screw me.

Bartering Yam, regardless of want I'm nothing
without scope, hope, nothing

without your possibility. So let's laugh
like the thieves we are together, the sieves:

you, my janus gate, my Sigmund Fraud,
my crawling, crack-crazed street sprawled out,

revisible, spell-bound.
Hello, joy. I'm thirsty. I'm Pasty Rectum.

In your absence I've learned to fill myself
with starts. Here's my paters. Here's my blue.

I just wanted to write again and say
how much I've failed you.