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In another city of kisses and downpour and artistry and summers
average castes of kids
bothering to put into words
a vigil against getting over,
against bliss,
hopeing to love another senselessly. Tired of being
recreational,
of de facto psychotherapy--
scarring, piercing, tattooing, daily living
like schizophrenic Buddhist nuns
in eyeliner and silver lipstick and magenta hair,
incandescent cigarette
ash tipping into gravity.
What's the point of thoughtfulness
if suicides give over the world
to pickup-trucking, classic-rocking, fag-bashing thugs.
Do you find yourself indistinguishable
from fiscal automatons, from sporty
anti-esoteric types in the blank center of the metropolis,
from gypsies wandering past death camps,
from ascetics preaching off their medications,
from the republic of the young and shoddily appointed
left at municipal fountains, at flame-broiled
downtowns and vitamin-fortified
strip malls, left to second-hand fantasies,
to Parises and Pragues
made of hometown coffees? Tons mourning.
Critics and frenzied kids and adult children of blank, our love
feeling all unreciprocated.
•
Who seek the good who are skilled and peaceful.
Monks of Brahmans, princes and men seeking a world of non-
things, being against nothing,
in a world of births. Bulks of tissue packed on bone,
each morning reborn
into the cycles of suffering, how not to love
what might go missing?
Having known the body, having backstroked through the ocean
having flirted, held a gaze--
--have ears to hear, have presence moving forward
perpetually in loss, withdrawn
from the godly energy of potential
into the fallen actual of kinetics.
Eyes crush light into forms:
our continent's starving in lean-tos, 10 thousand skulls
dug from the flat earth now
concave with death.
In a photograph, his back puckers in long welts
dug by fingernails. In this gory world
of joy and terror, each of us scarified
by unions requiring blood and come
--to be beyond that and still adhered to a body--
you can't cast off your only husk
if you've met your idols, if you've seen
what life can be with attention undivided
in a silent Sunday house. He is a man of light
ballast, forever.
opaque from the white hot punct of the instant.
Pornographic stickfigures over busted urinals.
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What's in order, chemically, for our brother's soul,
freak ghost of our suburb, dead now twice or three times
raking leaves from our branches?
The music passes through new circuitry in me
that maybe doesn't understand
angst so well anymore, can't tell
establishment from subversion
so clearly anymore.
I am not young, I am not old, all my favorite people die.
Neither establishment nor anarchist,
I am left with what he left--
discs, icons, silence laid flat across the floor.
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The Gnostic soul,
associated one's true identity, ascending
over widespread creation,
clings to the possible, a world of passage,
a place of compression
in which you may seek yourself, released
from your origin into the only way of knowing
the scarce world,
and be that again.
An origin sung to us as passwords and hymns.
If Pisces Jesus by his love of the world
wipes clean with distortion
headphone bedrooms and cement floor bars,
growling sermons on a low stage,
fingertips scrubbed at frets,
your body will be light
condensed into motion, your head
arching to parades of superstar
incognito billions, beautiful girls and boys in drag.
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Going psycho over a drum kit in dress and makeup.
All earlier, earthly forms
clotted into a moment
hearing the songs of a reader of books, a delighter
in others, in the measurable you's and me's
undone by phenomenal laughter at breakfast.
Everything liquefies.
Voice, thought, tissue, blood.
Cock, belly, spirit.
Milk, seawater, semen, afterbirth, saliva.
Happy, without-want happy.
Given again the womb
start again with "head" and "heart."
"Head": the tissue
sponging the wet world.
"Heart": the muscle
sucking and squirting liquid fire and its resin.
In a hypothetical afterlife
he and I--currents of matter
drunk and divine
on a hypothetical patio--
wipe sweat from our noses,
sucking honey from honeysuckle in the summer.
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All there to listen, to awaken
to live band making audible
awareness like functioning newborn palms
but our awareness not making it that far, as far as the pop charts.
His throat the bong you hit from.
Because the meek will always inherit anything good.
Leaping into the pit--
the one in the many, anyone
delivered back to the light
--hair launching the other way. He is nowhere
any good to us. No more awake
than asleep, the moment
only the resin of abrupt burning and the pipe.
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Rio:
A Journal of the Arts