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 passing cars
and carve grey epitaphs into your skin,
or wake dangerous with an arctic sweat
because your body’s in the habit.

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 white man’s acid burden -

this is not a place where people live, the plastic city,
but make-believe their dirty lives a golden atom,
swirling close beside the vortex of the world.
near the very center, where the storm rages hardest.

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 at your mouth:

the rich comfort of chestnut smoke
from the crypts of your young lungs
destroys me, and I am lost to dreaming.

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 yourself of a different age
but didn’t act it, fed like a pettish,
dripping child, choking loudly
on anything too bitter, or wrong.

how you asked me if I hated you,
and how I didn’t have an answer -

- just like at the very end of the world,
beside your ghastly, wingless back,
I am laying lock-jawed, crippled and sick
with the depth of my inaction.

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 you’re dancing, and I know his name:

his name is not my name, but in those simple seconds
I am him, and we can sway together till my drunken feet
collapse – dispel the myth of dancing. in Babylonian ruin,
I am tumbling down the steps of self esteem
and breaking my body on those building blocks
you keep to culminate a future in which I am not.

still I’ll watch you dance, and I’ll forget to call my mom,
and she will cry, remembering how when I was just a child
I would barely scrape my knee and cry her name.

now, I am more than broken, and I am more than young.
but even with the freedom I’ve received, by grace of generation,
I am unhappy. I would give a full ten years of life if I could skip
my gory twenties, and escape my mother’s first regret
that these are empty years, and I am still her son.

but I am so drunk. and I do forget to call. and I will watch you
dance until your skinny legs have swallowed every fear.
and that is my defilement of my era’s greatest gift:
that I promise, (and with my mother’s blessing,) to forget.

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 as an editor should, and knowing,
I hung myself with your damask sinew.

bowdlerized, my poems gasped like a
pretty young back-alley mugging,
black and purple in the name of someone’s bread.
they dragged crimson flutters like an eviscerated dog,
moaning and bleeding the fuel of every good thing.

as you wrapped your ribbon legs
around my well-bred truthful lines
I barely caught the scent of office paint.
you tied those truths off with a smirk,
while I spoke with the ghost of Lester Cole.

you meant well. you wanted me to test you,
to push against your good intentions.
Born Free, I pushed, and in my fifties pinko logic
I thought that you were strong enough.
you said, “to censor is to love.”

but like the sticky seal on the fold of some
cold-headed document, you broke under my thumb.
I had one wish on that second, spine-broke day:
god, with my words, and in all my loveless sex,
save me from the death of good ideals.

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 he made
all those moans into music.

and this cut
is his decision.
he is too young to know
any god-damned thing. I think
he will be dead in four months.

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 were glad to make you a queen
and to be ruled, gently, and how

the span of years from then and now
do fade, my god, what it’s like
to be ruled gently, and how
I loved you then. we were so right,

but now we fade. my god, what it’s like
as a student of theatre, I pretended that
I loved you then. and we were so right
to lie. the love was false. I sat

as a student of theatre. I pretended that
we were only players. and it felt good
to lie. the love was false, I say
in that counterfeit wood.

we were only players, and it felt good.
so close we could see the nails
in that counterfeit wood
and we took them. your eyes are frail,

so close them, and see the nails
that built walks in that imagined park.
those walks, we took them. your eyes are frail,
but they see truer in that dark.

when they weren’t afraid to roam
their words were truer. in the dark
I remember that imagined park.
the young called it home.

the myths of common language blaze apart.
the ash of dying camels in his eyes.
he never got the chance to read it all.
I never really got a proper start.
so broken rise these smokes into the skies.
and broken fly our hearts into the fall.