FOR Serafina, AFTER FIVE YEARS

Dear Military Wife,
I went alone & drunk to midnight mass 
on a street rotten w gift shops & bridal boutiques. Thought of you,
& of what you call poetry. Thought of your kid & you know how I worry.
The headstones in chorus: much, most, moon & stars, 
Lies here, love always, devoted, dear, devoted etc.
In the church clustered haloes swarm round Jesus like white blood cells, 
open eaves wide as spread legs above it. 

Most of the theory exhausts me for real,
Like it’s bad drugs, bad medicine, 
a noxious substance held at arm’s length by clever people 
who don’t see the trouble, don’t see
How it clouds the world and clogs the throat. Precocious misfits 
From no-count shit towns forge a lonely bohemia through sheer force of will 
& the fuelling cruelty of others. It isn’t courage, 
it’s damage. In your skirt & dicksucking girlhood 
You were the best & bravest of all the daisies in the field.

I don’t want to talk about all that. I’m never going back. 
1 shoe [unheeled], bag of sugar unspoiled, waste merch, no leaves, 
mercy on the xmas lights, round cupped hole in the body unseen, the crucible 
of language itself & all the metaphors have fingers 
& what we can’t know we don’t know - you know? 

I dreamed I attended your wedding party -
there was wet confetti on the steps of the church & the moon 
hung in its cradle like a skinny bright baby in the crook of an arm. 
Typed half of my immune system out into a chat window
& called it a love story. Red bricks, gray skies, girls out late in gooseflesh
& going straight, if that’s what you call it, 
was like being loamed in a box underground. 

Jesse Darling is an artist who lives and works in London and Berlin. http://bravenewwhat.org