we fought ghosts of the cold war
whistling cuban jazz and smoking with our fathers,
while warm rain collapsed guantanamo.
you had surgeon’s eyes in the first months,
and pushed against the sutures, spreading the democracy
of white bread and standard oil.
the applause crackled like high cane, and we listened.
but you will not understand,
not while you jerk your thumb at [...]
the city has teeth, and I see them like broken glass,
urban plight and failing inner-city public schools.
taxi horns can wash it out, the prayers against new
malefic meetings in back alleys or downtown bars.
they say that it makes sense, they praise
the gentrified hispanic quarter, rich men wolfish
at tiny taco places, clutching their guts and grinning
down the [...]
new lover, what ghost is in you?
you are like a dead god in marble,
ancient, and paralytic with sleep.
you are a ruin, and so explorable.
I will unearth from you whole rooms,
lonely in Alexandrian patience.
you have been waiting a long time.
we rest at the foot of the barrow,
together, finished with pick and brush.
you sleep, and I am [...]
I am thinking about you in our last days:
how you clung to our domesticity,
our lady of forgetting to put the toilet seat down,
and burned out our last shouting matches
on small drugs and washtub liquor.
how I read your lips across the hotel bar
as you left silent sainted lipstick stains
on the rims of strangers’ glasses.
how you fancied [...]
even with the soft black weight of all my mother’s
disapproval, I will love watching you dance.
in a nameless, shifting somehow, it reminds me,
the way your hips twist, and the way you walk the line,
of the mirrored table or the pipe, the tablet and the pill.
I drink all that whiskey, and I see your god,
to whom [...]
tied to me, you were red tape.
I had only known you for one day.
but like the ivy blooming you smeared
a trail of red that spared my writing
the terrible trap of honesty.
it was instant attraction, you stuck with me,
and I was caught in the tack of your coils
as you spoke, like a razor wire tangle.
you cut [...]
you wear red.
god,
he was heroin drunk
on the floor of his room
in the nineteen seventies.
he has like
one chance
with you in that red dress,
but hiss from Vietnam
starves him, and it passes strange.
the needle
is half gone
in the promise of some
specific something that
he tries to give you, but won’t.
he spins that
muddy waters
record now, on and on,
like it helps that [...]
the young called it home,
that space between sunset and full dark,
when they weren’t afraid to roam
the hills of some grey park.
in that space between sunset and full dark,
thick with the fog between
the hills of some grey park,
we were glad to make you a queen.
thick with the fog between
the span of years from then and now
we [...]
a tender note of winter’s promised bite
against your lips, from Halifax, or worse.
your car could drive itself along a terse
or narrow twisting country bluff. the height
could kill, or make us dizzy, but we fight
each other’s curves and scratch and curse
your small back seat. so look to me, your first
good touch of fall. and I, on [...]
the papers burning, what a gift to see
a ribald self defacement of your work.
‘cause I am in those pages with the murk
of seven broke-glass years’ bad luck, and he’s
got scars like Rohm beneath his player’s fee.
but “nazi-esque” and “queenly” tend to lurk
along the lines of tenderness; he’ll jerk
off sweetly in your self esteem for free.
the [...]
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