The Fire Is All There Is

This Fire

By Alice Notley

No one loves you more ... more ... more ...    

There were sincere lies everywhere placed directly before

the next step. Does everyone pretend, part of alive

I am proposing words — All structures have crumbled

in earliest death. I’m crossing the yellow sands

It’s so hard to know without relating it, to you

shaping a heart, take hold of me and someone says

I don’t get it! You don’t have to have love,

or you do, which? I don’t think you do; before

the explosion? I was here without it and have been in

many places loveless. I don’t want you

to know what I’m really thinking or do I, before

creation when there might be no “I knew”

Everything one’s ever said not quite true. He or she be-

trays you; why you want to hurt me ... bad

Want to, or just do? Treason was provoked

everywhere even here, by knowing one was one and

I was alone, a pale hue. The sky of death

is milky green today, like a poison pool near a

desert mine. Picked prickly pear fruit and I

tasted it, then we drove on, maybe to Yarnell.

These outposts where I grew up; I didn’t do that

I have no ... identity, and the love is an object

to kick as you walk on the blazing bare ground, where ...    

sentimental, when what I love, I ... don’t have that one

word. This fire all there is ... to find ... I find it

You have to find it. It isn’t love, it’s what?

"You must do battle with Eros"

The Elements

By Alice Notley

 

You must do battle with Eros       I am

more worried about space, pressed for details

collapsed in chaos with my sword holding up the sky the

girl said. They cared not for love lying ever that they loved

But I your leader wounded in gender and bleeding

for Eros fought it away from my true beginning as now.

Always climbing that hill in several ways.

One goes past the Baptist Church and through the ugly

trees, houses I only visualize in dreams

you have no right to pursue me to my origins man

as bipolar as the one candidate, forgettable

as the other. We once lived in a postwar barracks blue

heated by a black stove of assumptions

Eros a youth admits no equal; Aphrodite the slut;

Chaos is whom I admire that keeps forgetting

love in favor of this terrible mixity I am

for example ... these poems. Out of the pre-beginning

a different beauty. They want you to confess

something like in church, that a man will

save you. But I am your leader savior and poet

I am your general out of the desert thee

most ardent void precursor of love

Eros approaches again not the man but quality

sculpted genitals arush with the words

of unreason: I will never die. Which I is I

if I can remain chaotic I’ll tell you who you are

that you’ve never anticipated, but know

the only one. Without a thing. To be is not

to have; nor to belong; nor to have been born.

You are not the child of earth. Beauty still thy name.