My first night in New York
- My first night in New York I was such a beautiful
- dick, my soul circumcised, no shielding foreskin,
- wearing some sort of leotard thing and gold fabric
- safety pinned around my waist as a skirt, I'd pierced
- one of my ears with a darning needle, ice cube
- to numb it, to hurt: the only verb I knew, stabbed
- through that ear hole a gold safety pin, the kind girls
- back then wore on pleated skirts, and K that first night,
- his robe an evil green, his unacceptable glamorous
- nose, eye-holes as if precisely cut from his face with
- a utility knife to exhibit the dangerous spectacle at play
- inside his skull, Roland Barthes: "I cannot get over
- having had this good fortune: to meet what matches my
- desire," and, I would add, he who would slaughter me.
I want drugs again; whimsy
- I want drugs again; whimsy. Frenzy, hilarity, as when
- visiting mass with Juanita, we were twelve, I wasn't
- Catholic, laughing ourselves sick at the names of saints,
- Linus, Cletus, Clement, Sixtus, sparks went off in my
- brain, I had no squeamishness, I'd eat alligator, rabbit
- with the head on, fish eggs, eyes, hitchhike playing
- the harmonica, got into a helluva jam, sitting in the cab
- of a truck between two nasty bumpkins, saved when
- a turkey vulture crashed through the windshield into
- my lap, Jesus was looking out for me that day, celebrated
- not being murdered at a bar that rose out of the fog
- like an iceberg, I was wearing a stolen blue smoking
- jacket I called a kimono, yes I was a knave, a fool,
- (Cornelius, Cyprian, Chrysogonus, Cosmas and Damian).
My tits are bruised as if I've been with a rough lover
- My tits are bruised as if I've been with a rough lover but I have
- not been, not today, I once gentled a certain someone and it turns
- out I loathe gentle, and bought a hard red pear, hard enough
- to pound a nail into a re-enactment crucifix, and I left the hard pear,
- I mean dick-hard, on the red windowsill, abandoned it to its solo
- ripening until it began to exude that familiar musk, it might as well
- have said eat me, or sung it soprano, but the more it wanted my
- teeth in its hide the more I dodged it, I'd lost all respect for it,
- like that poem in which ripening plums are evidence that eternity
- is illogical, well of course it's illogical, and by the time I decided
- to just go ahead and dive it had broken out with a bad case of fruit
- flies, my fault indeed but I blamed the pear, let's all blame the pear,
- this is not a metaphor but a fable whose moral is as old as time:
- I'm worried about these bruises and who will hold me when I die?
I dreamed a color, no plot, a color, strange
- I dreamed a color, no plot, a color, strange, there once
- were shoes called oxblood, the color was akin to oxblood
- baby shoes but not that exactly, nor calves' liver, though
- closer to liver than heart, nor that girl with oxblood hair,
- nor mahogany, fuck mahogany, I fell once, walking on the rocks
- along a jade lake, the cut was small but deep and mean, my
- blood, magenta edged in something the color of antifreeze,
- an unthinkable yellow-green, bioluminescent though not like
- a glowworm, fuck glowworms, they lean toward the false indigo
- of cheap lit-up wristwatches, maybe a certain bunch of gladiolas
- delivered to my studio apartment by Mikel, who opened
- my honey jar and licked all the way around its mouth, fuck that, it
- incensed me, the color some combination of glads, honey, tongue,
- rage, and Mikel, dead so long, the Kaposi's lesion on his thumb.
I could do it. I could walk into the sea!
- I could do it. I could walk into the sea!
- I have a rental car. It's blue and low on fuel.
- I have feet, two, and proximity. I could do it.
- Others have before me. Jeff Buckley (1997) he
- was only 40. Carol Wayne (1985) Matinee Lady
- and a photo spread in Playboy. Dennis Wilson (1983)
- after diving for a photo of his ex-wife he'd tossed
- overboard years earlier. Hart Crane, well of course
- Hart Crane (1932), socialite Starr Faithful (1931),
- she was only 25, she drowned in shallow water near
- the shore, her lungs all full of sand. Starr left behind her
- sex diary, current whereabouts unknown. 19 men.
- It's dark. I love the dark and it loves me.
- It would be fun! I could walk into the sea!
