1

My favorite saint tells me I complain too often about my soul’s shortcomings, I’m

grateful
                 2

for the dreams I remember, W— pushes apart my thighs and asks in Punjabi

when I’ll finish, nothing in this world more beautiful than its share of tenderness
                 3

your body is denied, O soul, you’re the sum of tragedies I’ve had to invent
                 4

to circumvent the ones we inhabit, I need you because I’m the only loss
                 5

I’m comfortable with, you’re either something I must overcome or something I’ve

already failed to, I can’t
                 6

so I don’t think of you in the present, I lack the imagination
                 7

to change, what my favorite saint says I believe, although the soul knows its

wretchedness and knows what we are is 
                 8

wickedness, what a great favor the Lord does us by sending us this distress the soul

must be occupied with
                 9

when I say I’m too simple-minded to understand your mysteries, I want you to tell me
                 10

I’m being disingenuous, you manifest most frequently when I awake with a puffy face

and a hangover
                 11

in the morning every regret is that one opening through which
                 12

the heavens belch a riot of blond cherubs, I can only think of my life as a sequence of

crucial refusals, cracks
                 13

down a wine glass, a line of riot shields too ready for me to overlook, tomorrow a

rainbow so faint it won’t register in pictures, I browse through a list of victims to

practice my outrage, without feeling, the world you’ve made
                 14

shall give me the next simile that conveys with poetic precision how little I think of

myself: I look around to make sure someone’s overheard me.