Let's Make It Instead

It's easy to imagine
myself, unshaven, forgotten
apartment
listings on a sheet
of folded graph paper
creased soft under
my fingers

how's the water pressure
check
are pets allowed
check
where do you get pets
check
and

has it ever been haunted

and the guy laughs
a little and shakes
his head

and I say
I'll fix that

Washout Harvest

Sawed off just a right - for makes alone
mine and me in correct consecutive
Tuesdays, in Nigeria

careful, the downtrodden understand us, warrant a hunger, a trigger, a sneaker. Raspberry
Suede: the letter: happy hiring. Up
one run, the sick stomach drop
boasting is losing season

A hit (ballerina-length)
is a torn hamstring, a congressman, a smattering of appalls. These kids, a composite
loss; they fire loch, they shed plague, they breathe deep graphite

furthermore standing in nylons nevermeans            in socks, in powder blue.
Really, then, it was a date with the Kansas City Royals
that provided the cure.

Mother and Child

the past is a vacuum and

it’s horriblehollow—

the inside is just lint

and shame—

the past is a space where

dirty things are stored—

in the same small,

reusable womb—

most of it is just fluff

from the carpet, the

fabric of living, stirred and soiled

by feet and soda,

unbirthed back inside as

she pushed across the carpet—

I mean she moved across the carpet—

and I fled into the bedroom,

scared of the hollow sound—

the roar of the suction—

I heard the ringing in my ears

of creation

from the kitchen

—your mother is calling—

You think the phone

is ringing but

it’s difficult to say—

the vacuum is so loud—

don’t let the machine get it

pleasedontletthemachinegetit

The Histrionics of Game Shows

I’m not making this up, and I’ve got a right to say it:

Polo was my game, and my mallet was the sky.

But I’ve no memory of my history, and

now it’s just myself, and a pretty

freckled orphan in some cat’s pajamas. Also, it seems, a dog.

“Don’t give my dog chocolate, because it’ll make his stomach

swell up and explode,” she said.

I watched her

face, small as hope,

small as pixels, every fresh outburst

a little prayer. The sun sets

like a southerner, sighing,

easing down on the porch.

Memory is a passionate pillow kiss

at eleven, a

sordid mock mop tango

to boot. Your fingers run down

it’s hair, your eyes are ablaze.

and history, oh!

history has ever been a game show,

a silly indulgence for academics

and lonely mothers. And we each

choose a deity—Barker, the Immortal, or

Wise Trebek, or maybe Louie Anderson,

maybe. He’s the Nietzschian candidate.

It’s yours like a jockstrap, though;

no sense in pretending someone wants that.

  

“You mean pigeons,” I said. “And probably Alka-Seltzer,”

but she was already busy with breakfast—

She folded little stars into an omelet, removed
her apron
and clicked

the hanging chain.

Watching Mad Men Makes Me Feel a Little Bit Ill; Like, Physically Ill

Old Blue Eyes had it,

a whimsical masculinity--
lying and believed and rising and obscene—

smoke lifting like prairie kitchen steam,

            ash falling like

Winter on the postwar era.

I could have held a cigar like Hitchcock, or

Milton Berle—phallic, forgiven—

what drifts
is the sense
of self-awareness
blown out in rings
to hang

at arm’s length

a smoking jacket

removed when things got

hot

Oh, and

I never really figured out 

that winking thing

Another Costume Party

We get died to the roots

for animal painter’s eve.

Slip a shark a fin             shuffle

in past some marine life—

two coke-thin crustaceans.

We check the competition

    we are the competition

Lions (fresh from the coliseum)

this place: Tangier/ Arkansas.

I am my uncle (whom no one has ever met)

the costumes=complication:

everyone is a pregnant teen disguised

as something else; is everyone here?

Wolves howl on the roof; we’ve places to be.

 

Dinner party: we connect colby jack

(eats cracker crumbs)/ Marble

Madness/ A needle in a stack

of needles. The show is

starting and we are clumsy

adolescent sex/ pure charisma

David Duchovny/ Silk Stalkings

I watch the foyer as costumes revolt to

bathroom/bastille; I think:

you were going to be a comma/

you decided to stay home

inside the vein

we were Trolley Dodgers when we met,
just kids, blue collars on factory necks
Brooklyn Dago
hearts on sleeves, sleeves rolled up.

We took down the navy in our first year
together,
the pinstripe empire crumbling
the same week he moved in. We were
don’t ask don’t tell with everyone from the old neighborhood,
but the way mama looked at me—

We loved Jackie R, but we never talked about why.

We got hassled every
yellow moon/rent due but
this was the fifties, and
blue laws played louder than
Behind Closed Doors, which
is still 20 years too late.
“you queers better get out if you know what’s good for you!”
So ’57
comes for everyone

a Kind of Blue
Train, and Period,
while our team skyed to L.A.la land. Even then you
could trace the
varicose tracks to the west,
to San Francisco,
where there’s an excess of blue-blooded hearts.

But we left you a note, Brooklyn, a
muted third with a little
twang: Sorry Lucille,
you ain’t coming where we goin’:
Trolleyhaven—Tony Bennett,
Blue Velvet.

For Motionable Horizon

It was icy on the waves. Six months until June,

and the ocean held us like books on a shelf. The stress

from our lunches, taken seated on the ice—the moon

beamed like our mother—we used our napkins often. To obsess,

honestly, on manners and bibles (serpents,

arks, god only knows what else) is moot

these last days—an age we celebrate with cake,

honor like the boat cars of yesteryear—“What a beaut!”

Evil, too, these unparkable hulks, these sleek things, Garbo-

sweet in their nostalgia. It’s at the past we play,

picknicking on the frozen lake like a lost hobo

waiting for the swell, for motion and horizon. Today

cripples in the sunrise, refracting through rhinestone:

present pooling heat, melting ice like cologne

After the World Tour

Mildew is the basement’s skin.

Damp socks, pork rinds, Gunsmoke

marathonning. The mold is a forest, perhaps—I pin

an oak to my throat, the folk-

lore mysterious like the ocean. What’s venom

to a desperate loanshark? Cartilage/enamel/

cocoon, we are entombed…damn us, denim

us, force us to the dunes. We trade a camel

for a caramel, for fountain gun

confections, for a song. I left with a tattoo,

a return address on my neck, the orphanage, a nun,

A heavenly lady/place and a fondue

farewell, dripped across the sweets, the fruits, the vegetables; A fetish

abandoned like my mother, the sister: "hell ahead, red as rainbow."