If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things the others don’t know. It’s what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.

What should I do about the wild and the tame? The wild heart that wants to be free, and the tame heart that wants to come home. I want to be held. I don’t want you to come too close. I want you to scoop me up and bring me home at nights. I don’t want to tell you where I am. I want to keep a place among the rocks where no one can find me. I want to be with you.

in an effort to get people to look
into each other’s eyes more,
the government has decided to allot
each person exactly one hundred
and sixty-seven words, per day.

when the phone rings, i put it
to my ear without saying hello.
in the restaurant i point
at chicken noodle soup. i am
adjusting well to the new way.

late at night, i call my long-
distance lover and proudly say:
i only used fifty-nine today.
i saved the rest for you.

when she doesn’t respond, i know
she’s used up all her words,
so i slowly whisper i love you,
thirty-two and a third times.
after that, we just sit on the line
and listen to each other breathe.

When I haven’t been kissed in a long time,
I walk behind well-dressed women

on cold, December mornings and shovel
the steamy exhalations pluming from their lips

down my throat with both hands, hoping
a single molecule will cling to my lungs.

When I haven’t been kissed in a long time,
I sneak into the ladies room of a fancy restaurant,

dig into the trashcan for a napkin
where a woman checked her lipstick,

then go home, light candles, put on Barry White,
and press the napkin all over my body.

When I haven’t been kissed in a long time,
I start thinking leeches are the most romantic

creatures, cause all they want to do is kiss.
If only someone invented a kinder, gentler leech,

I’d paint it bright pink and pretend
Winona Ryder’s lips crawled off her face,

up my thigh, and were sucking on my swollen
bicep. When I haven’t been kissed

in a long time, I create civil disturbances,
then insult the cops who show up,

till one of them grabs me by the collar
and hurls me up against the squad car,

so I can remember, at least for a moment,
what it’s like to be touched.