September 12

             The world is all that is just in case of emergency Having no good guidebook and feeling Compelled to listen to everybody else’s fucking Advice, directions, and predictions, suddenly We had to lie down and make the children The horizon. As if on our deathbed we Had to choose whether or not to believe in The Maker once and for all. Because it said so Right there in the Koran: If you turn away from God He will simply replace you with other people But we had been taught since childhood that We were special and irreplaceable And it said so right there in the Bible: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself But now we were beside ourselves. For a long time Afterward we argued. Or at least as far Back as we can remember. Everything before That is black in the mind and now white On this page. But don’t be deceived: Letters aren’t grave markers. Over our fears, which are not many but deep We’ve tried to live the children’s lives Through love, and they’ve tried to give us More of their lives by screaming At each other. This is to be expected From making the same motion with Fingers, tiptoeing, if you will, sometimes Banging bodies with plastic keys Were it not for the plastic of life, we Might all perish in a parish of puns And morbid thought. But thought once Thought is no longer elastic. Confused? God does not clarify; we exist. Which brings us to a conclusion Having nothing to do with us: We Have deliberated long and hard about Writing an introductory essay to a book You don’t hold in your hands right now, In which we’re disgusted by the problems of art And children and art and politics And art and war and art And anal sex; but in the end, which is not The conclusion of anything until we pass Away from the memories of Our mothers and into the children, We decided an introduction would be Tantamount to confessing to a crime One has yet to commit If there are errors, therefore, in the work Before you—things you don’t like Or things you like but not in word-form Or things you don’t believe are really Things at all—we blame them on the children Just as you blame them on us. For we didn’t Plan on writing this book. We didn’t Intend to provoke a lot of bad feelings in Its reader. We weren’t even thinking about War or fear or safety or courage. We know That you can get those things elsewhere That in other arts, say, at the movies, You can be moved to small tears or that Say, at the symphony you can fall Asleep gently and unnoticed. After all, what’s A little book of poems going to do For you? We wrote the following words Because they made us happy at times And at other times they made us sad And then rhyme like assholes. Don’t think that we had a good time Writing this. Don’t think that we had A bad time either. We simply had time, and that’s Probably a greater sin. For you Can plainly see, we are not one. But we are not two either. We is this third thing Between us: the dildo or the children I love you, Wife says to Husband Now lock the door The children love you, Reader/Reaper, Because there’s no one left to adore I love you rhymes with Let me go, Or so say the children of dead heroes.