Without fingers of ecstatic women

What kind of a man would
Lives in words, marking them down as religion
As if life were a thing

You could inscribe, encode, digitize
A woman cannot be turned into art
She’s creation itself
There’s no binary to her

She’s magic, her care and womb
Loathes what is not real
Maybe that is why women despise poets
They don’t have time to become

Attached to a dreamer, their unborn children
Urge them to find less wild men
And besides, what atonement is there

In a life of unread poems?
I think I used to wash myself in that river
And I used to travel those landscapes
Maybe I was too poor to really travel

Maybe I was too cowardly
To find a woman I could stare into
And know all the beauty of this planet
I am nearly resigned to growing old

Alone with poems, like some familiar signal
Of my squandered youth, of literature
Being used to be my illegitimate cover
My design to escape from reality.