Cuomo's Important Failures
       

This moment, this very sensation,
must be what drives people to crime
or at least pornography.
I can almost imagine the state of mind
I want to have, but don't, can't.

In a sleeping bag
on the floor of a dorm room,
hearing, for the first time,
Blue, Joni Mitchell's lyrics
lurid with futurity.
Then Brecht, then the anorexic saints,
the Marxian critics making my parents
so nervous at Christmas.

A welter, a tangle, a bramble of longings
that don't abate in the later decades,
just become marginally more repressible,
slightly easier to bulldoze with focus.

I recall my philosophy professor
reading aloud "Musée des Beaux Arts"
as he tried to seduce me,
his wife and baby at home
in what must have been a too-small apartment.

What lust drove him to approach me—
was it only novelty, or can we finally agree,
across the long years, on tonight's despair?

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from Colorado Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission