Tabulating Lack

To recreate – and take – this pain –
this self-defining pain – to wrench from
your identity that most peculiar agony
which led to such excoriating strain that you
imploded from it: gained the life you nearly
always have: except when you unearth
this virulence – as now, when in this
sick green lamp-fire of your heart, you disinter

the vampire: well, perhaps that is its function –
through the masochism you extract
a salve: but no, that doesn't do the justice
that this gravity deserves: this magnet
at the center of you serves a stranger aim:
you cannot even summon up much shame –
and though the point would seem
to be to dig up reasons that you blame him –

you have even disengaged from that.
He left you on a druggy summer morning
with another man – and suddenly your new
and blasted life began: and sometimes
you appear to need to wallow in that tiny span
and spasm of excruciating life to bring it back.
You are evidently made not only of
what you construe as asset, but of lack.


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