Addiction

I wish we could control this revoltingwant of control: these peoplewith their spongy eyes, their mouthsof trembling shoehorns, billhooks for penisesand bear traps for vulvas.One taste of sunlight and at oncethey can't do without it. Water,the same, and food, and air,and a dozen other squalid habits.Some -- like their copulation,a rusting carnation in a cut-glass neck --are not physically compulsive butthe partners can't stop wanting them to be:so we desire to be rapedby love, who would fill us, they say,with an oil from the lit braziers of stars.What if, doing it every day,we resemble pistons, and the slow poisoncuts our lives off at 70:it's the grim determinationof our passion. And beyond this, even I --defended in childhood by my strong fatherthe piano and my mother the virtuosofrom knuckles among warehouses -- even Iam addicted to the mild light of words.