Tenaciousness

I'll sing hosanas
to the skin
between the bottom
of your tee-shirt
and the top of your
underwear.

Bright William,
how is the pastel
polo shirt faring now;
the horizontal stripes,
the summer is over
and fall's ascendent?

Underneath
the muddy flannel?
I may need to be
ill for a while,
to enjoy citrus
in a new way

and be driven
to long form
reading by boredom
with video and
not anything outward.
It not being

you, King of kings,
necessarily meek,
spritely and very old.
Arsenic and deference,
more painful, somehow,
the less there is.

Bill; this'll not
go away, ever,
if you don't want it.
Hard to be so
hard pressed against
isn't it?

Dyspnea

You introduced me to
the wall/wall/floor: corner.
Nevertheless. Dyspnea
is shortness of breath.

Ukiyo-e: can you imagine
a surface so matte that
the pores come up off
the surface to meet you?

If you met jouissance over
water crackers and very
nice mustard (the bulbous
brown seeds broken jaggedly,

and bits of scallion clearly
visible in a tough of
amber oil) on the banks
of a salt marsh, that

would be an austere
and erudite way to meet.
Jouissance is cerebral
(and soaking wet! like

a maraschino cherry!)
You are more corporeal
than that harlot, if as
intransigent to meaning.

Universe B

Even the terrible garlic clove
and plump tomato are divined
by your hands and a knife.

Izmir is far and wide: this is
the second time it has come up.
There are helium lights,

it is like nine o'clock at night.
There are a series of squares
on the oceany vista; the sky is cyan.

Being difficult for the sake of
being difficult is an M.O. one
can write home to mum about.

Dov, we had a nice time;
for a decade. Patrick, the
ellipsis kept riding the horizon.


The lips kept swooping in from
Universe B.

Familiarity of the first pop radio
signal, to the moon, say,

gives way to flat waveform.
The lips are dry and dark,

like daubed with burnt cork!
who in the office would've done that?!


Remember the third verse?
that started with "You are
not so inviting / when I think about it."

Handful of Aspirin

If the very worst way to die
is drowning, or fire in the lungs,
or having taken poison that
you thought was medicine, or
anything; the very least bad
happening would still be very bad.

This is a fair assumption, Patrick.
You have red hair now in a quiff,
and a short beard that is neither
too bushy nor too neat. Like a man
into the aesthetics of a little hatchet
with pastel bands on the wood handle

and a wrought steel head honed
by a Japanese master.
Maybe you come from the west
now until Russia and then Alaskan
immegrants. I haven't asked you
about that yet, but I will.

How is the design career going?
When did you last make pressed tofu
on the barbecue fire escape? (That
was dangerous.) And gave me
a handful of aspirin and said
"Keep some of that for later?"

for Don Draper

By far the nicer
was not so dark
a secret, carried
the ravaged leg
back from Korea.

Erstwhile witness
lifted limbs from
the listless. Was
a water grass creature
issuing starch and

being the vertical
fibers of plant growth.
Going the way
the water went.
If still, stopping.

If krill, killing.
If ass in the
M.A.S.H. tent,
an affront to the vanquisht.
It is simple:

You have worked hard
your whole life
and your station was reduced
by some arbitrariness,
and you died, and you
gave up your life
to magnify the portcullis,
and you died, and you
made it back alive
but sustained some grave injuries.

Wight lift, that
Mila-Kunis-looking bitch
is made of life!
Justified the unit tattoo
with the new flesh.

Lifted the leg
over the temporal dike.
That one hurt.
Torn up flesh
was like dirt.

And how,
the desiccated beef sounds
and snifter of rye.
The arc lamp,
I love you very much.

the Best Part

Living was a poison,
I swear it.

Ted Danson existing,
the morning commute
for whatever that's worth
Antidote elipsis,
ravagers; elipsis!

Crowded mess, is
it just in discrepancies?
flicker,
ear death,
the headache or the happenstance

or's it
just easier to discern then?

8; 9; 10, fat hen
if you think this
doggerel's insincere
you're missing it.

The smoking wants
the smoking clef.
"Johnny?
Is that you
creeping in the dark
behind the corner
of the topmost stair?"

Loving wants what's left.
Tells itself
this is the best part.

an Allowance

We know hedonism but not
longevity. Who is to say, really,

that the smile metastasized
for sad happenstance

and not as sad evidence that
we were owed it.

Tetrahydrocannabinol

Not to be party to night, but
anguisht little mite, went
from quick lark (unpresumptive at first)
to the turnscrew happenstance
all too well known
there is a culvert of time there
of snowswirls
the thumbdrive that each iota
alive: he is a drugged boy
how could you have…but
you did not put there
but is there. Slack
sinew and elastic
the night
the ruddy cotton fluff
the half ruint pint of Newcastle Brown Ale
remonstrance,
the buckshot
-sized globules of solder,
some organic compound
compacted to an orange
-red striated pellet
of salt
ethanol concentrate
tetrahydrocannabinol
and tin-foil gone matte.
That one hurt.

On the Bus

When we are reduced
there will be even less
of us.

Justice; like there is one
mechanism for
getting it,
unbearable though
it may be.

Brutus, you sweet rube;
take it all on yourself

this life'll be ending soon regardless.

Trekked what Marathon'd
be like,
took the bus, preferred
taking the bus.

Unbearable is in the making,
the paper truss.

I am exhausted with the
buttresses.

I am getting so cold in here
are you not?

Benjamin

When you said to your
therapist, "idealism

and bunk," and deft jingoism
came in a six pack

labeled WEARING UNDERWEAR

AND A TANKTOP, JACQUES TATI,

HAIRY LEGS, ALL DAY LONG...
Fairy lights on your

bedroom window,
and outside: noir so black

that the femme fatale
could not abide to kiss your jawline

with the stones' razor-edgeful
of soporific. You smile.

It is not so bad a life;
shalom night.