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 [...]
confederate tape hiss,
the bitter renaming of old things.
like a half-sized new york jewish
union man, the moral ad executive
who has a problem with the word
“fructose” and so it does not
find its way into fast food advertisements,
these things are monumentally unfair.
and just like we give up the history
that was written down, and then obscured
with union blood and [...]
i spun elliott smith for far too fucking long
until i fell asleep crying on the edge of the bed
and half of my body was slipping off of it.
later i woke up when i hit the ground. it was
from a dream about planets, and about me,
and about how much i would like to see great
things before [...]
birds have tiny hearts beating in their chests, and they need
to flit and fly on specialized wings, fueled with seed.
they scrounge and scavenge for lumber for nests,
and smartly they live on the wind, on the crests.
they can live and raise babies in the boughs of a tree
and they are not stupid, not ugly, like
i’d barely, hardly
i wouldn’t even touch
if you gave me one inch of ground in this trench battle like world war one
i’d take it
and with full force hold on to it with my crooked teeth, like a wolf over prey
you would have to crush my skull to collect it
you would have to put a bullet through [...]
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