I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:   
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.

Is it the sea you hear in me,   
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?

Love is a shadow.
How you lie and cry after it
Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.

All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously,
Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf,   
Echoing, echoing.

Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons?   
This is rain now, this big hush.
And this is the fruit of it: tin-white, like arsenic.

I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.   
Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires.

Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.   
A wind of such violence
Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek.

The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me   
Cruelly, being barren.
Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.

I let her go. I let her go
Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery.   
How your bad dreams possess and endow me.

I am inhabited by a cry.   
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.

I am terrified by this dark thing   
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?   
Is it for such I agitate my heart?

I am incapable of more knowledge.   
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches?——

Its snaky acids hiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults   
That kill, that kill, that kill.

You do not do, you do not do   
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot   
For thirty years, poor and white,   
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.   
You died before I had time——
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,   
Ghastly statue with one gray toe   
Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic   
Where it pours bean green over blue   
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.   
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town   
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.   
My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.   
So I never could tell where you   
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.   
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.   
And the language obscene

An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.   
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna   
Are not very pure or true.
With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck   
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.   
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You——

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.   
Every woman adores a Fascist,   
The boot in the face, the brute   
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,   
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot   
But no less a devil for that, no not   
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.   
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,   
And they stuck me together with glue.   
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.   
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I’m finally through.
The black telephone’s off at the root,   
The voices just can’t worm through.

If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two——
The vampire who said he was you   
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There’s a stake in your fat black heart   
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.   
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

My heart weights minimum a tone
An army's feet pounding on my head
Maybe I'll wake up one day to notice
That all my life was just a dream

And maybe I'll be better off without you
You left me here with all my thoughts
I'd write a zillion words or walk a million miles
I'd sleep on broken glass just not to lose your smiles

I travel for you around the world
Collecting moments, oh how absurd
To bring you beauty, to bring you joy
I wish I'd be a little boy

Where is that silence you primised me?
Why is that distance so close to me?
Why is your violence still hurting me?
Why are your eyes avoiding me?

Let me say thank you for all that you have given me
Thank you for everything you've done
Forgive me for saying one last thing
I miss you and I hope you hear this song

I travel for you around the world
Collecting moments, o how absurd
To bring you beauty, to bring you joy
I wish I'd be a little boy

I'm dying for you, can't you see?
I'm lying for you to be free
I hunger for you, 'cause I can't eat
I'd vanish for you in defeat