"the only number is 1.
Any number larger than 1
is illusion."
            -Shuntaro Tanikawa (trans. William Elliot)

when is the moment going to come
or will it come at all?
i've waited patiently.
i've waited pacing.
silently, i cursed at her,
while i waited in my room;
impatiently codemned her
in rambling frenzied venom
from across my room.
the moment tears me back to back,
asking: will i drown before it comes?

i've tossed and turned on
nights.
chewed on my cuticles with passion
afternoons.
masturbated bitterly each morning
after i woke up.

so impatiently
pretending to be patient,
waiting for the moment to arrive.
i wonder will it bring some surprise,
or simple disappointment, both?

i am not neat.
neal is not neat at all.
my thoughts are organized
like chinese checkers
when you bump the board:
in a random scattering of things like:
why again?  and when it happens next!
until the text starts backing
up the flow.  like clogging drains.

i am that dirty joke that
wrapped itself around
the cuticles of afternoon
ejaculated on the hands of time
    penetrated night
    screamed out into doilies into potpourri

i know, i know to let things go.
but there were times, i tell you
there were many times
when many thinking moments passed.
and there were words, i swear
i never said.  i never even thought.
that now i think, say, yell,
i swing off balance into mirrorsmoke.
i never tried
so hard to have no gripes
so hard to duck behind
the conflict of relationship;
i lost myself in trying to be the shit.

i swing my fake machine gun, yelling
"here i am"
    and
"everybody pity this again"
"don't you even understand???"

should i try to reignite
the passion which has singed
a moment from my life?

the moment may come yet,
but as of yet it lurks
around the cuticles of semen stains
on duffle bags
in greyhound lavatories;
omnicient, stained upon the sunlit
up ahead.
never reaching a fulfillment
or an end.

-Neal Miller, 1995