Eschatology

Even though you can take me any way you want,

you’ve chosen to take me seriously, with teeth

in my skin reminding me why boundaries

bleed in pleasure’s war against the domination

of reason, why permeable shifts between then

& now means the sheets will be changed

before dawn, before the sun spreads her

legs giving birth to a world where the first thing

I feel is the breath of God on my back.

Watching you sleep, like the Book of Hours

Resting on the lap of God, this ring I wear,

wears me now. It’s the first time it happened,

the last time it will. The first time love

ever sounded like monks breaking bread

on an altar of flesh. The last time you’ll turn

from a dreamless wall and not find me dreaming

of you. Everything’s pure eschatology, darling,

the old fulfilled by the new. That’s why I’m

here on our first Christmas morning picking

the straw from your hair.

The Seamstress and the Tailor

I remember her trying me on, hands

                 slipping through holes in my words,

                                            fingers dripping in adjective oil, tying

the nouns and pronouns together

                for fear they might be unwound or erased

                                            like so many names in the poems before

                                                                       her own walked across the page.

Thus began our obsession with fashion:

                 the when to strip down and tease the light

                                            with every trembling violent verb,

the when to dress up and shelter the skin

                 from all things cold in a stranger’s eye.

                                            But only things that are cold.

When the sanctity of speech is threatened,

                 the ten commandments on the stone of our bed

                                            bounce like babel with no line breaks,

an unholy syntax of do it or else, expecting too much

                from lovers of words. Only then do we slowly consider

                                            what cloth should grace the body gone silent.

Relics of the runway we are not.

                                            The seamstress in me and the tailor in her

                                                                       bound by garments made of trees.

We bleed paper from metaphor’s marrow;

                                            red ink suffers the least in this world.

                                                                        Everyone knows that by now.

Parasympathetic Pink

Somewhere between crest and crash,

you remembered to paint the sky with relief,

a parasympathetic pink. Like the morning sweat

of fourteen years, drying on a canvas, our bodies

were chaos framed by care. When hope crumbled

into pinches of salt, into pleasure’s sea of drown

and don’t, there you stood like a lightning rod

at the edge of swim in me. Both of us needed

the shore to be more than a church where the sun

is praised, more than pews of emerald waves

where jellyfish sting hallelujahs. Climbing the cliff’s

steps of scars from a driftwood shack of bones

made falling back down less romantic, less real,

like Suffering losing its paddles that night beneath

the shadow of a pearl. Holding me down,

a brush in your glass, I begged to be pink again,

to feel myself splash off the end of you like

Pollack using bourbon for blue.

Gone Blue, Gone Gray, Gone Away

At the heart of Appalachia, near the Ohio River,

in the back of my father’s throat, a combine

strips the past from the present.

Inhaling “no,” exhaling “yes,” everything

green and gold in between becomes rows

of what can’t be forgotten.

Never have I listened so closely to the

stethoscope swinging from my soul,

or been so devoted to one man’s words

beating like a snare drum in both our wrists

at the end of a battle, gone blue,

gone gray, gone away.

Made as I am of rough southern straw,

broken and bundled in muddy brown fields,

the near fatal choice of not being chosen,

is a memory none of us have. There were

no crows to scare with hands that did not

hold my own. There were no crows at all.

Waxing the Dents

Waxing the car with my father

always made me dream of a Hollywood prize

I would get for performing my role

with such brilliance, a script totally void of spirit,

with lots of stares and buckets of sweat.

But the prize never came.

No one outside the neighborhood knew

he rubbed it on, and I rubbed it off,

creating the delusion that father and son

found mutual joy refurbishing steel that men

in Detroit made in sweltering rooms

with masks on their tired, weary faces.

He thought the fact we’d gathered there,

under a blazing, burnt August sky,

proved we had passed that place on the road

where father and son kill each other for fun,

rather than spending a long, silent day

waxing the dents in what men made to carry

them both far away from each other.

Mudslide Boy

Of course, you didn’t know. How could you?

        It’s not as if you were raised like the others,

                 grown from the ground of the ruptured & raptured,

the sweetly forgiven, abandoned to the truth

                 of never settling down with the unsettled self,

                        with words they denied & flesh they condemned

for not believing in what the hands used to call the soul,

                 which turned out to be a misunderstanding;

                                                                      you thought they said soil.

The gritty, gone, going away of everything

                 precious and good. A mudslide boy,

                                  down the hill of all your hopes and dreams,

the daily unfolding of your disappearance,

           a black & white print of your cheap silhouette,

                    hat an angry god fondled with guilt, while choking

on mirrors he said was the light. How painful

                 swallowing must have been, & still be so wrong

                                    about being right, like all religions based

on blood and the million ways to spill it.

                                    Of course, you didn’t know.

                                                                       How could you?

Confessions of a Pentecostal Buddhist

Baptized in the church of Pygmy rattler fangs

hanging from my foot like prayer bells in Tibet,

the water, I submit, was cold and confidential, a

lesson from the gospel of drown me Lord quick.

Obedient and skilled at the gestures of deliverance,

those hands knew how to shake and bring down fire.

Clouds of smoke crossed my eyes

from yards ablaze in Selma, then floated

to St. Petersburg where ash found a home.

Daddy’s letters from Saigon proved a man still loved me.

I sucked the envelopes of air and kissed him

on the stamps. Mama’s little boy became

a man with freckles, a buzz-cut adolescent with

apocalyptic leanings. Thinking arsenic must be

sugar’s evil twin, I tried to poison her with

Sweet and Low, but only made her kinder.

Thus began my interest in pink bags with powder,

a way to live with lightning without the coming storm.

Walking on the wild side to a land of naked strangers,

this novice of the night mistook daylight for the devil.

Many years would pass before the cushion and my mind

had covert conversations about the here and now.

I remember when they started, where I was,

and what we said. It’s why a candle burns

on the altar of my flesh, swaying back and forth

between the wounds and wonder.

Glass Animal

During Death’s last visit to our house,

you were making jewelry out of sea glass.

One by one the necklaces came,

hanging on clouds of ball chains and leather,

dangling above a valley of cleavage,

the road between hills shattered and shimmered

with what the sea could no longer hold

in its salty mouth of sorrow.

The lighter scraped my thumbprints raw

As the dirty glass bowl of dopamine clouds

became a place where nothing lived, not even

animals a child might see. Maybe that’s what

I feared the most, that you would find a piece

of me breaking through the sand, then pull

me out of a hole in your foot, howling like an

animal.

Boys

It sounded like

boys in the woods

kicking a dying wolf.

They called him faggot

and his eyes rolled to

heaven.

They called him hungry

and his face ate the

earth.

Like a drunk parade

of soccer ball stars,

mindless brothers

welcomed them home,

stained with the blood

of untamed things,

on a bullet train fed by

adolescent miracles no one

was asked to unmake.

The Fire Island Boys

Warhol wasn’t the only one who loved

those Fire Island boys, marble statues

cloaked in sand, whipped by

pleasure’s summer storms.

Caution fainted on a thousand zippers,

a thousand eyes and tongues. There was

no such thing as a stranger’s bed.

Every mattress played the same song:

Love as if loving makes you immortal, carving

a valley of light through the shame; the

crippling years of closet-shaped posture,

breaking the spirit’s spine.

Those were the days of aquatic ecstasy: steam

baths swirling with deep sea divers trading

their handfuls of pearls, risking

their lives in the dangerous caves of

some other man who had to be entered to

prove how good, how beautiful he was,

even if only for an hour. If I could weep

as loud as they laughed and rage as hard

as they loved, maybe the young wouldn’t die so fast,

alone, on the edge of a viral abyss, wailing at the red

autumn moon, God waking up to the sound of his sons,

washing the sand from their eyes.