SUMMER, 1993

In the Castro,
people used to wave
when I walked to work in the morning.
Robin had my same name--
I met him when I made to appointment
to get all my hair cut off.
Every day after that, he'd call out the door to me as I passed. Hi, Robin!
And it was the smallest sort of joke,
but the kind that made you feel
the most like laughing.
At the store where condoms hong
in symmetrical lines like soldiers,
I told boys that they still had to wear them, even if they both already had it.
You can pass different strains to each other, I said, You can make it worse.
I liked the display on the rear wall,
rubbers inflated with a stream of air.
You can touch them, I'd say.
See which ones you like the best.
Steven knew more than the rest of us,
so sometimes we'd refer a question to him. He'd put a condom over his head if
a guy said that he was too big to fit.

All that summer there was Lexi,
and endless sport with free samples of lube and dental dams and finger cots and oils. When she came to the store, Mark would
obsess over her almond eyes, her smooth skin.
You are a straight man trapped in the body of a faggot, I told him as we got high in the back room. Lexi would bring fresh
breads from Auntie Pasta. At night, there would be wine on the roof at Church Street, where we could watch the cruising down
below.

I took a walk the night that Clinton hired Roberta. People were gathering in the road like teenagers on a boardwalk. Some were
wearing masks
and beads, some had champagne.
Before it was completely dark, the street was filled with families, drunken men, dykes on motorcycles. Guys dressed as nuns
made speeches from
the bed of a truck.

It must be ghastly now, I think.
A great, beating heart pumping
that blood
through the empty sockets of doorways,
down the shriveled streets of all these memories.

2.
LEFT

Alexandra called about the drummer
who walked away with her hand
while I sat on linoleum in a kitchen
too far away from her to matter.
It was all a useless experiment,
a study in form, skin, smell.
So a chest will change shape under
finger and a hip will flatten to palm.
The stomach smooth like curves of
the receiver against my shoulder.

How strange that first night in bed
with someone else's mouth at my thigh.
The pulse of five fingertips like
snakes tongues looking for familiar earth. Where her knotted hair would be,
just the gap between bedsheets and
the strangeness of the other neck.

I have left her like a body leaves a hand sliced off in an accident.
I extend my arm,
an amputee's fleeing forgetting
in the moment just before an
ordinary shake.

3.

COMING APART

Lying in my bed at night
with those fat people who live upstairs
doing the one-legged Indian hop on my head I think there must be a better way than this. We live in this house together the way
green olives in a jar roll around one another. Our eyes, meeting by chance on the front porch, spin slickly away from each
other.

Lying in my bed at night
I think maybe the bangs are their headboard against plaster. Fat people having sex to spite me, keep me awake. I think of the
new black and yellow drill I got for Christmas. I think of using it to drill a hole
in my ceiling
so I can watch his fat thigh smash her huge, white belly like a melon.

I picture, lying in my bed at night,
the way her brains would shoot from her head if I drilled it through with my shiny new black and yellow drill. The night they
played recorders past twelve, I thought of tying them both to chairs, upside down, their asses turned toward heaven begging
for the skinny, cheap plastic of the instruments. The people upstairs keep rabbits, too,
on the thing back porch above ours.
We barbecued the droppings that fell through on a rusty grill that came with the apartment.

It is positively insane to pay
seven-hundred and fifty dollars a month
to lie here in my bed at night,
bashing their brains in with blunt instruments, carving them like turkeys with an electric knife.

When I see them early tomorrow morning,
me leaving for work, them stepping out to get a paper, I might just roll right up to them
and tell them how they crush me.
No more Mr. Nice Olive-at-the-bottom-of-the-jar. I might just bring my brand new drill out onto the porch and get my damn
money's worth from
this apartment.

4. FISHING

There is a woman by a bath.
The bathwater, steams, bubbles.
The smells are of vanilla and lavender.
The lighting is soft, candles throw shadows at plush towels and a thick novel.
Outside this glow, the house is dark and quiet. The phone is unplugged.
The children are asleep.
There is a woman stepping into a bath,
and she is alone for the first time in hours, maybe days.
She has hung her green robe on the hook by the door. She has put her two feet and two hands into the water, adjusted to the
heat, knelt, submerged each leg and each hip.
Her hair clings to the nape of her neck in the moisture of the small room.

And this is the end-of-a-hard-day poetry that strokes you, makes you sigh, maybe makes you roll your eyes. I could titillate
you, you know, this woman could slide a soapy hand up
slick thighs to rest for a moment on her cunt. What, you weren't expecting "cunt" in your Calgon? This is my fucking woman,
people, and right now her cunt is engorged to the textbook maximum. And you know the part
about her children being asleep--
I mentioned it in the first stanza--
they're actually awake, staring at their nudy mother through the slit in the bathroom door and the girl is holding the boy's thin
and hairless penis in her tight little fist for no good reason.

Oh wait. There's the doorbell. She couldn't unplug the doorbell and there's someone just barging in to the dark and quiet house
and oh look
it's me--don't wonder what I look like,
just open your damn eyes and look--
and I'm smacking the incestuous twin
babies out of my way and I'm in the
bathroom now and I have these big boots on but I am getting in the bath with the lady anyway and she is screaming and I say,
Fuck you muthafucka shut the fuck up
and she screams rape rape rape and I grab her face and plunge it into the Calgon by my boot and say No muthafucka, I'm a POET
not a rapist
and she's thrashing around like a fish on a deck and I am the Gorton's man with my big boots and the yellow slicker I forgot to
tell you I was wearing and I take out my fish knife and I flip her over and gut her like the fishy dough blob that she is and I am
stranding in the coil of her intestines and the twin babies are jerking each other off and I take a bottle of Raspberry Bathing Bubbles from the Body Shop and squirt them down her throat and her big fish eyes are bulging out but she doesn't gag and now
her breath smells sweet and I wedge my butt
down into the tub with her
and the water is cooling off so I mix some more hot in and lay back and the water seeps behind my slicker I've got a hand in her
abdomen, and I work her like a puppet and she says in my voice, but higher "I worked hard all week and I DESERVE some time to
myself" so I get out a vibrator that I had in my pocket with the fish knife and I insert it into her like an OB without an
applicator and then I flip the switch on the end of the handle and her cunt starts smokin like a cigarrete (I guess my mom was
right when she said not to use the hairdryer by the sink)so I think I may as well make the best of it since I got on my Gorton's
asbestos suit and I shove a gloved hand up through my vagina and into my fallopian tube, the left one, and then ba-da-BING! into
my ovary where I take one egg (after squeezing it to be sure it's ripe) and I extract it, rinse it often in the red foamy bathwater,
Calgonate my ovum, being careful cuz it's like the size of a pea, and then I ask the girl incestuous twin to run and get her Betty
Crocker cookset which she does because the boy incestuous twin
fell asleep on her (asshole)
and she brings me a little imitation Corning casserole dish and I put the egg in and slip it into my Betty Crotcher Frying Cunt
Baking Oven for fifteen minutes and while it's cooking I sing the soundtrack to "Rent, the Broadway Sensation" and when it's
cooked I eat it, and share it with the girl incestuous twin who wants to try my puppet.

I am the Gorton's fisherman. I am insane, pissed off, in need of therapy. I shoved my modem up my ass and I receive faxes
there. I snort Calgon, I'm a jasmine junkie.
I live on a boat in the Atlantic and only the fish understand me. When I leave this poor gutted woman floating in her own entrails,
I will feel nothing but the revolving paper roller in my butt endlessly sending messages
Calgon took her away Calgon took her away Calgon took her away