I am opposed to the disgraceful modern softness of feeling.
—Nietzsche
Seeing the softness
in me they
harden
-
Relying on the softness
they bend back the wily branch
close to its join, its deep-curved
bend it shall not
snap
-
Pushed me not
to see me fall but
themselves to stand
Pushed me not because
I am rusty but
water’s slow rise
covering their feet
Hanging under an odd swell
to discover its shatter-point
-
When they pushed me I blew back softness
breeze across their cheeks and when I hit
them never in the face they felt only softness-
bones double-fisted fine
absence
When they fell against me it was to feel
the softness in me and know
it was real
When the softness in me glowed like
a torchlight
-
Softness made me scratch it out
burrow it under my pillow
Subjected to softness I drank it down
it burrowed under a gleaming soil,
fragments of mica-fed, a green shoot or more up
through the platform cracks, a new life
excited by
the prospect of new things, a better life,
ease, comfort,
stability, a sense of rightness,
moving forward, staying loose,
soft, unwary, unworried
by softness
blanketed my face and made
my features thin and unknowable-
aglow with excitement
-
I wouldn’t have said
I was always on the verge of never saying
when the multitude-eyes looked past then through
then almost-at askance
Contrary to want softness
tongue-searches then settles
on its character of softness. How it will,
like softness, how it will not
like the others, how it will not tell
what bright face it wears when its hot-ache
to be seen
-
Other times I have a kind of softness
that will blow you away
Beyond the crooked-seam of being pushed
over it presents
its face of desire to mute-lipped observers
Wanting to be seen
did my seen-and-seeing-face blow them
right out the rising waters? While
I cast about
trying to be true
What softness says I shall now endeavor
Searching about for a way to say softness
but I haven’t a clue
Having no clue is
an article of softness, a syntax of stammer
and drown, diction of being
on the verge of never seen
-
Without my softness I would have lost
my pearly name
My reputation built on softness,
no my self-recognition
The boys on the platform singing I think
I recognize that song, I think
I recognize the self, in motion, being
seen, I think I sense the
softness-fatigue of the senses,
slights, then, or encumbrances
their slight oblique striking sideways,
Softness sensing the fatigue
it causes. Slights
or encumbrance actually
many things about softness are
sideways in nature
More than ever softness says:
think before you speak
More than ever the softness says silence
-
The softness was a drag there’s no doubt
Well-liked at parties
Threw back its head with laughter-
full
Having more
friends than it could handle
Softness didn’t know when to quit
-
Softness wore green gloves the color
of money
Two lifetimes I needed,
one invisible and one clearly seen to conjure
everything it needed to survive
Eyes full of stars
but belly emptied of love or recognition my
many-faced softness with only one
name, its pockets
empty of change
It wanted to be more
than it was
naturally, a born
loser naturally wanting
a new face suffused with eager wanting
going out and above and beyond its born capacities
Softness: are you sure?
are you seen? are you capable
of?
-
Nothing comes naturally to softness
Desire present as form,
habituated to envy it
pauses before every answer
unwilling its
fleet footsteps
Softness came before
me will outlast
The boys on the platform singing their song
-
Softness hides nothing not even
strength, a bad
correspondent
Famously unable to keep any secret
I always want to know what it is
they are saying about me
I want to know what I mean
to them, what it means
when they never on the verge of listening
I want to know what it was they
ever saw in me they
looked past and never
I want to know what
cost what kind of
Discretion
a hard softness skin
to be unnoticed
and why should I
tell
-
The boys crowd around me
on the platform singing
My softness made me not
say and
softness stays my hand
-
I never loved so softly
with so much kindness
as when I could not see what I was
loving
or to see if it was deserving
not I the tepid wash of a martyr
but disbelieving of the eyes and
their hardness
-
Despite softness I want
to hear their song
Discretion the hook on which
I hang their lies
But I see and have always,
even cast-off from
the mirror I looked and saw
myself, warrior
and bird
Both had eyes to look out with
-
I tried my best
not to be consumed by jealousy
Jealous of whomever could
look as I look
without having to be me
Jealous of the looking
without the soft life
-
And then the softness in me was a
force to be reckoned with
I was the student of looking
and softness my manual
My indication, my deepest instruction
I looked the way that suffering
pointed until I could
look no further
And softness I saw there
I saw you too amidst the looking
I spent so long on this kind of looking
Softness was the vault I kept
the looking in
Discretion was the shock of
what I could never have
been seen
-
I walked the softness walk and
I heard their boyish song. What goes
walking under skin: words
could not say it. Yet the softness
walking onward as if it could be said
As if we could enter into a soft
world and be made whole there
And yet as long as we are not
dead we must go on living
as if our
living mattered
under the skin
matters
Even though we cannot say it
-
Word-hammer to break
the opacity
But no instrument
to break open softness
-
I heard your boyish song, I drank its
softness-sorrows in and in the everywhere
it had been, I say look softly
and slowly as if understanding were
an autopsy, do you know that softness
no instrument can break will lead us at last
into the forest
of song where I will know you
perfectly
where with no bodies our bodies
were perfect
there in the softness of our
relations
where softness was not an
annex to the real
where what is real is not what
can be touched or injured
but rather what we
cannot live without
-
Nothing can be imagined
that excludes our looking
That which / there are things I am
at a loss to explain
how could you imagine
a room opening onto a corridor
that leads to no place, where
you can never be seen and
no more can I tell
Softness not a matter of
apprehension
Discretion not a matter of
what you know or what is kept from you
-
Relying on softness I buried an
edge into the swell. Softness
the oar and silence the oarlock
A word in from out it was:
please. And: thank you.
And softness spoke. Said:
of course
Not desire but
the harmony
of the hard
-
Softness my assent. Leapt
tsunami over. Delivered me
to the top of the crest, where I could stand apart
watcher-lonely,
outsider angel, the cleverest of all
small, imagined birds