aggressions, pointillist
or grisaille
chickens
called my bones
“bird-like,” meaning not
a Mandate or Inches
centerfold
pianist onanist,
monochrome practitioner
I could draw your leg
or I could cook
your leg
my purple pants have
red crayon stains
your lips wiggle when you
read Gide
male philosopher
as seafood aspic
nostalgic
for H.D., for Mina
Loy, for Samantha in
Bewitched, for Amahl
and the Night Visitors—
a performance interrupted
by necking sophomores
he plays
ukelele by the river
at sunset
garbage bags go flap or
smack like
prayer flags
“crystalline,” a word
I’ll never use
I shocked the James
Taylor lookalike with
my badly timed hard-on
end my career
before Torn Curtain
Wursthaus, where we
ate (out of false nostalgia)
in 1976
the guy whose gallery
I tried to visit was sick
the guys
who flirt with me
tend to be diseased
a revenge
fantasy I worked up
while watching The
Flintstones
lust
for Barney’s shave-
needing jaw
sound
waves here
(the hospice)
cluttered with
mood music—
each day a new Bible
verse to use as
purgative
my
grandmother at the
Art Deco fair in
Paris, 1925—
posing as
a grisette
forward motion is
antithetical to
spiritual transport
I don’t want to regain
consciousness—the
Swan Lake school of
euthanasia, permanent
somnolence,
IV drip
Valhalla
everything
I am is damned—
describe
a ricotta tart
three-
dimensionalizing my
captivity, treating it
like a Glass Menagerie
system of symbolic
equivalences
the table
is cream-colored and
squat
the table
doesn’t have genitals
how happy the table
must be, to live
without sexual
identity, sitting
in its foretold place,
like Lot, a good
servant of the state
mornings
when I skipped synagogue
and lay in bed and watched
Flower Drum Song
as a suicidal plunge
away from responsibilities
my likeness to
Erda
chugging Red Bull in
Lausanne
chew the
inside of my cheek
like a betel nut
pacifier
heal his anus,
mortify it and then
un-mortify it
don’t try those
Buster Keaton tactics
on me—please remove
the word “genial”
from your vocabulary
interludes
of trance, when
my blood flows
topaz
Kim Novak’s final
film should have
starred Anna Karina
in a tzigane mode—
open your temple
for me to pour some
lumen into its
teak aperture—
redwood
or eucalyptus—
aromas of my
rage
the guy who
tried to sell me a
blue cardigan sweater
flashed his cock’s
flat head—like
a tepid rattlesnake—
I memorized the vista—
what else was I
supposed to do with it?
we
watched the Grieg piano
concerto octaves
(cadenza) from the
perspective of the soloist’s
inebriated mother, or else
her neighbor, whose
lawn was dying—
I’m the gardener,
I’m guilty of
its death by drought