#30

"Close your eyes," Micah said. "Put your head down." But what a story! What a face! That poetry will revive itself, the promise still pristine. All this tarrying worth something in the end. And the end ever moving: my fingers tied to books with string, and the street a sloping runway for the clapping of heels on glass. What I mean, in the gray of times, is what Pygmalian meant when the flowers he had sculpted in the garden had no other hand to pluck them. He leaned out the hole that formed his window, looked up at the ocean of clouds, and longed to be a sparrow or a dove. But the breeze that struck his torso was like a staircase too wide for him to climb alone.

#29

So quick to hubris, poetry. A drunkard or delinquent with salacious leanings. The poet who receives from telephones and magazines the rhythm of his verse. All sorts of windows clouded by thumbprints. And a chorus of mannequins, Grecian style. The City of Athens in excavation. Torsos bulge with meaning.

The best poets sing of sex in metropolitan terms. Devotion in kneeling near candles, no God. Their words come forth in jets. On subways. At lunchtime. Ephemera filling the swell of pockets. They know what the Buddhists mean by no-mind. They have a job, or two, and they do them eyes buzzing.

I wanted to join them in afternoon romp. A child-as-man in uneven quatrains. Wrote, "the box they keep me in is a rattletrap affair." And squeezed myself luridly in imitation. They were my uncles, and fathers, and secret momentary lovers. They had dicks half-hard and wet with the saliva of Gods.

But my dick, in the vice of others' fingers, abridges its praises. Their beds no beds of poetry. How dear for them to love beauty in its physical guises. As I am slid and bent into postures never totalling in prayer. As if the path from my scrotum to my ass were gifted by the crown, and all the men who worship there in words that could never be my own

#28

One should say something. That's how it's been written since the first sunrise. The hand that takes you down the path. Reclining for the moon. He was, I should say, not out to impress me. The wheel not partitioned into currency. I held my own, and stayed silent.

But was much besot at the press of lips, tracing for me the words on mine. One's mute resistance parting so readily for the petals strewn by spring, the perfect framing for evening gestures. Time as it dissolves into breezes. And yet I did not tell, even my heart, to beat.

As if every arousal were a sign of longing. Every breath shared, a recycling of the old stories. As if fingers brushing gently the ridges of my stomach were meant to touch more.

I am standing as still as a statue, to put it simply, raised on a turning dias, my erection following the path of seasons.

#27

Not that this would matter. The dogwood tree, and the patch of tulips. You are otherwise engaged. Denim clad. Heading somewhere, probably.

But it's a playground on my watch! Lilac-thick, islands of flesh in the green. I am meanwhile enthralled. A distraction, each cloud. Likely tailing someone. Rather very likely.

#26

The city is closing itself down, flattening itself across, emptying like a box or a bag or a home. Shops shut and stay shut. Winds die to wheezes. Exeunt. And after. Dust-raw, rubbed. Oh, the plaques of buildings! Bare and brown, the streets that lead nowhere. The possibile itself in exile.

So what if it is spring? Time's hands, unlined - as if their time were far off - secure the windows, board the doors, and fill the walks with refuse. No forward address. Salute. Words are set in bundles on the curb. I will become, out of the boredom of such solitude, a vandal. And the trees will blossom, the seasons cycle aimlessly.

You are leaving for New York. History is ending.

#25

I forgot to spend the afternoon forgetting. Gamflin, as the Scottish say. While the shirtless boys (too young to distract me) kicked a ball in circular progression in the center of the Square. By the empty fountain. And the lofty stone urn. I straddled a bench in the three o'clock sun, read of Arbeiter and Augenblick. The students and their Wissenschaft, a limpid translation for desire.

In my own mind, at the site of home, there is a picture-perfect picture of l'amour. And so I have always fallen - fallen with and fallen for - those who carry cameras by their hearts. Those keepers of revelation, the moment caught by fingers focused forward. No - not forward, but here, now, in the now that is passing, surpassed, at once, and gone. These photographers, holy men, whose work outlasts its moment. I follow in their shadows, never tempered by a pose, and snap away at them, the prophets, those, and miss their prophesy-ing.

And I am ever exposed. A heretic, un-seer of the divine Image.

#24

In spring's first dream of rebirth, you came as you, Rich as Rich, the whole of my memory a dictionary of self-referring symbols. The heart asks pleasure, first. But first there was you, and then there was Rich, a conspiracy of silences as yet unfilled. The first of a thousand prayers never futural enough. And my first thought, upon waking, not to mourn, but to sleep. To return first to the tableaux, to what at first seems an ending, but is the mere ground for a cyclical resurrection. Lazarus rising to find himself again, once again, falling. And then rising infinitely toward that first fall.

First, I should blind myself to firsts. Should walk past once and not twice the cafe in which you sit framed by an open window. I should not even walk past once. First, I should blind myself to seconds. Live in that no-time where nothing has yet commenced nor nothing neither ended.

But first, I must learn to read the future: the theatres of night contain parts written only in days to come. I must bolt the door to the past, post a sentinel at the interstice. Say to all those first on the scene, "The first must dwell in foreign lands; the welcomed first, the firstly first, will not be those who last."

#23

The difference is variegated yellow tulips, practically given away. The sun shirtless spread across the green. The difference is a winding down on one hand, a glass of gin in the other. The preparedness in setting out for the final full stop of the season. A drive for driving's sake. A travel grant. The curve of shoulders in public parks bearing different weight under different leaves. A stuffing the crypts of archives, perhaps, and smashing the mausoleum stairs.

What do we do with the old symbols, with the less-than-symbols of past viridities? Post them as personals, comparative texts beginning in revelation? I am looking for the old truths, one might say, disembodied now and in need of incarnation. I am looking for the measure of his touch in yours, a play of forms long since detached from the proper name, and so your name as good as any.

Or one might insist on difference. Say the old is the old, not the new. I am looking for the orphan beginning. What ingenuity though! what fracturing of history, in the pruning of separate garden paths. For one may want to make one's way back some time in the future, when to be well-trodden does not signify a need for charging anew through bramble. I am looking for love, one might say, whatever that might mean. I am looking for an again that is not identity; I am looking for a splitting, temporally, of the very I that is looking. And so your name, one might say, is just as good as any, but not as good (which is not to say, though, worse) as his.

#22

Halloween: a group of us, bottles of beer in hand, dance together at Woody's, one by one departing until – two o’clock, the dance floor stilled by the shine of heavy fluorescent light – at last, only Blake and myself remain. Two “let’s-pretend” faggots in disheveled costume. A blue dress ending before his knees, blond wig resting in tangled slant upon his head. Myself shirtless, arms wrapped in electrical tape, my lower half sweating in pants of shiny black vinyl.

Outside, the evening is haunted by demon voices, drunken shouts of fright and merriment filling in the spaces between buildings. The city alive with the dead long past its usual hour of repose. There is nowhere to go, at that moment, but our respective homes. Except Blake, fumbling for non-existent pockets, discovers he has misplaced his keys, left them in the jacket of a friend who had slinked off towards bed at an earlier hour. We walk together to her apartment on the other side of town to retrieve them. Blake barefoot, high heels in hand, and my naked chest inflated like some wary chaperone.

An utterly unaccountable excursion. A diversion amongst trick-or-treaters too old and wise to be so. Oh! thanks be to those misplaced keys, those wasted hours spent in costume, on a night when the streets were filled with make-believe.

#21