“I wish somebody would take a razor
and just slit my throat,”
my mother often used to say
at that lovely time of evening

when the stars gleamed like spangles on a corset
wrapped around the broad, ungirlish waist of Earth.
“Put a bag over my head, pretty please,
and let me blow my brains out in the sink.”

The mouth is such a terrible instrument,
such a bloody harmonica,
wailing its complaints,
but it’s the great insulters we remember,

the ones with a vocabulary
of cancer and barbed wire.
“I’m the fucking Jew here,” she would announce,

setting down the dinner plates, smiling like a woman
invited to consume a meal of broken teeth,
and everyone would sigh and shiver
over their spaghetti, and wait for that particular

Russian novel to be over.
What strange appetites we have
that make us rewind time and summon up
the landscapes of our pain

long after the lips have been unleashed
from their humiliating smiles,
and the silverware gone to the graveyard
for old forks and knives.

Yet some craving draws me backward
and the words for telling it
march out of my mouth with a pleasure
that is almost biological,

as if the telling were a sort of sweet revenge,
though I have noticed also how
each telling renders me
a little bit more ruthless, old

and capable of saying anything.

(Source: tonyhoagland.com)