Babayaga

Not enough? More, then, more. Grave addictions, the harshest needs,

the barest raw hungers, all voracious
open-mouthed, and panting to fill a gaping hole
with alcohol, baccarat, horse cocks, or the poppy scar’s sap, yes.
Then of course taunting self-doubts,
gnats of insecurities, shaming anxieties
that flash white and hollow like lightning bolts tearing
through sturdy hilltop elms.
A vague but constant sense of forgetfulness,
always nipping with haunt
or a shadowed guilt for an imagined crime
that chews and frays at your tired mind.
Oh, a fierce envy for new polished shoes or great worthless land tracts,
a fevered lust for rubies, sapphires, pearl, and other beachcombed stones,
a gravitational attraction and steady pull
toward expensive strangers.

A gift for spilling teacups and dropping china,

a tendency to catch cloth on lit candles
or absently forgetting hearth and stoves
till cherished cottage and castle have all turned to cinder.
A strong wind for ill rumors,
the instinct to fold both winning hands and good enterprise.
Thick ears, stubborn pride, intolerance for strange skin and foreign tribes.
A profound, waist-swelling and spine-splitting constipation,
thick running noses spilling green, infused with muck,
or, worse, eyes weeping ceaselessly till red, bloody, and blind.

Our choice, we can pick, between sullen disappointments of impotence or the sorry prodding signals of poorly timed erections,

and even better yet, a splendid epilepsy of unending ejaculation.
A constant aching and swooning in extreme sexual longing
for the inappropriate people and inanimate things.

Then there’s the murderous, a matricidal hunger, a patricidal bend, or, to be simple again,

we can loosen an indiscreet tongue
providing an unwanted gift for grave offense
and a penchant for fouling any convivial humor.
Yes, more than once we’ve been known to bestow the naked
pining for limelight,
the stark drive for a crown,
and the false nobility of immortal ambitions.

Finally, and darkest of all, the most elegant curse,

a numbing inability to sense or comprehend true virtue:
constancy, patience, generosity, and dear kindness,
when they are held in the palm of your very own hand,
seated by your hearth, lying in your bed,
when all that could fulfill your own heart’s hope
until your last and final day
is standing by your side, bright-eyed and true,
while you, so oblivious, set your hungry eye
a-wandering…