Goodbye, Key West--

My dogs, my mother, new friends, a dream that isn't really the city. A roiling tumult of mixed impressions and the Mess of it All at once. A decided setting & the resolution that it is about the lack of distinction between oceans, species, matter and waiting. This will come forth an an emission, an exhale, a lift, a sigh,

three warts

my phone calls tonight emerged in an ugly little clump of three. warts of varying degree, my phone calls dotted the reveling fog, faintly perceived by what lay beneath. cataracts, while one was not thinking of such things. while the clouds fell i couldn’t approach the subjects a little higher on the cloud-swept precipice. (i don’t know how they got there, were they helicoptered in?)
how does one complete the act of telling, of sharing an unplanned inconsistency, inconvenience, the uninhabited horror through which many do not suffer to illuminate? the unwilling spectacle of the first. let fester too long, you didn’t know what to do, did you? through your pocket i heard the muffled conversation of a muzzle, a continuous boasting as everyone checked himself in the mirror. your glossed eyes, perhaps? out in the open, the conversation existed and will exist behind our words. how do we face the hearing, the upfront issue through this yellow fog? left to weave itself again, to metastasize—a sordid aloneness. to see oneself separated, a tiny light through denim, through one’s fingers always fixing his hair, through an undeniable effort of a fixed and dimming lighthouse—the imagination of the self-destruct enclosure brings is too heavy, weighed down by fog-settled dew.
the danger of the second leaves the mystery, the blind devotion of viral determination and one’s ability to yet forget. cough & wheeze, the light closes on its own. unknowing worry, you are paid a compliment, no doubt. i see you accept it, haven’t seen one accept yours, haven’t seen him accept it & the tiring treatments every four weeks. do i tactfully resign to silence as i stifle my own cough? do i ease through the ringing voices and leave the half-assed flash of a timid contribution? this tell will run its course untreated or otherwise. it will multiply on its volition and yes it, too, will die.
and with the (hopefully) final (i want it to be last i swear i want this to be the last one) you recognize the symptom and cut a line, quickly before the sun can burn through. we sit at the family table glass-eyed and wonder when we graduated from the kids’ one, where they, glass-eyed but wider, gnawed fleshy legs happily known as “drumsticks,” snapped wish-bones in their oily little fingers, pushed red-stained tongues against loose teeth, filling the missing gaps with bird & dressing faces with smiles. unthinking of the cavity, the plastic bag in the cavity, the gore in the bag that may yet beat. to shriek a message, to cry into nothing. the indecision of whom it is to listen. in our solitary sleep, we wait.

City Poem

Imagine our surprise
in such a tear-down & rebuild-type town
to see you not dismantled
when the cranes leaned in to peel
away your façade & to pick
you down to the Tyvek.
Nude women’s rooms, we, two
gay men, assumed,
avoided you in the Capitol’s long shadow,
passed you each day from work—
between occluding breast
and steel lattice, we did not know
inside grew a coat of bricks
to race the changing season.

The end of summer held on dark green
& through massive progress,
through regress and demolition.
They had to kill the train
before they finished the station—
did the workers fasten a tube slide
of hooked-together trash bins
to one of your windows. Just hung
there draining drywall, 2x4s and chairs

regress, feckless demonstrations & uptight
outrage; world-wizened projections in pampered
white-milk, parented, rigid minds
encouraged regurgitated libspeak not at all
radical if not only for its origin;
of banal repetition,
two lakes fed such shit in the seventies, now to algal sludge,
& who reminded of them again and again,
the the victim the victim, ever clutching his hair.
Man of inhibitions both annihilated and reinforced by whiskey,
spilled flour on the counter,
on the bottom of the plate in the bathroom
of impacted sinuses;
closed and then smiling, near & foreshortened—
a subspecies hyperaware of dragonfly being,
mouthless, really—
of my wakening eye, rosebud open & not dribbles but shots.
To die a slow death during the work week,
sometimes for anyone else.



City, I met you in my underwear,
You tear through the calendar pages with such ferocity & direction.
Your life is not of direction but in one.
City, I am ready to get work.
You were my first dream within a dream,
City, I met you on the internet,
City, you had my boyfriend when I could not
& will continue to do so.
Quell my jealous fantasies,
urge me to carve a spot.
Not made for anyone, you, City, were simply built.
Let the companies repaint the colors you’d see
on a shining plastic stand-alone
on a crumbling brick front that’s tagged—
Napa Auto Parts yellow and blue, chipped away & improvised.

attmanbling thinking fewly i’m probably Christmastime

Funnily, i’m shaking like a pine needle. Growingly christman.

Christians howling with delight, when my cock onlookers be finching
flinching
grated the holiday grana
grana, christime flinching finches, grinningly French
face growl-grown, in my Christmas gown.
ducking for the forlorn snow.

wear ya fro

trees’ll still show when it snows. following the fools, the fold the flock,
flowing growing christians, their families o’er three ppl deep!
seminally crown, glowing gown, crowing clown, I’m fallingly shown
from my second-floor apartment is stunningly thrown, the couches are sewn.

hunting for trouble, so huntingly grown.
A haunting disposition, i’m eerily shown,
from rope, a chair kicked over.

crimson & clover echoingly in reverb piped, I’ll be coming over
though I don’t know you I’ll kindly reply.
kindly show you my face, kindly contact my eyes.

Havingly shown m’charlston grown,
I’ve gotta lotta fighting to go down, a gross dressing gown