exuberance really (an old story)

exuberance really
Originally uploaded by lorenzodom

I think dirty thoughts of girls with dry-clean blue dresses on,
strewn amongst golden spades and fallen columns.

and I think, with one eye open, that marrying a poet might fool me long enough
to speed me past the usual breaking point.

and I think that should I meet someone who wears saltwater sandals I would save
and save and save in the fall and through the winter and into spring, enough, just enough
to buy her a new pair of them, those same saltwater sandals—every summer,
just a new color,
and I’d paint her nails red, slowly, right before giving them to her, and I’d even place tissue paper between her toes, just so we could pretend that I know what I am doing.

I think Fridays and Sunday and Mondays even! might make me happy
when I find this poetress with the blue dress on, that I want to dirty, soil
with words meant to cleanse the soul of peanut-butter sandwiches with the crusts cut off.

and I think and I think and I think, albeit it is far past my time-to-sleep and that I am supposed to wake up soon again that I must write and finish this damned thinking, because I want to love
this devil with the blue dress on, I want to spawn more monsters with her, I want to write volumes
of verse for her, I want to have an odd number of syllables slide off my tongue
knowing she is the one, that makes me write and feel like I must….

and then, after I have acted without thinking and I have conveyed exactly what I was thinking and I have time to think about what I have done, I begin to wish I hadn’t.

it’s a matter of exuberance really, that’s what it is, that’s really all I want. I want that.

—it’s all an old story;
I always say too much
speak too loudly,
and spew.

What do you do whenever you get excited?

I just can’t keep my mouth shut,
‘cause there is simply nothing furtive about me.


“I love the words that comes towards me like a man, with sparkling eyes, with a loud voice, breathing hard and with great gestures of the hands. I want to hear the writer laugh and cry in it, to hear him whisper and shout, to feel him sigh and pant. I want his language to loom up before me like a tangible and resounding organism; I want him, when I read him in my room, to reveal to me a spirit that enters into me and seems to ascend within me from out of his pages.”
— Lodewijk van Deijssel —