Reinaldo
A code for help,
The Flower Book—
please
send, as soon as possible. . . .
Confiscated,
another émigré
“dissident”
novel under a boulder
before it burned.
Forced to re-write
the season:
Pills, rope,
and a hunger strike
in solitary, at el Morro
castle prison!
Farewell
to the Sea.
Accusations; inventions—
Rapes, thefts
and burglaries
by Castro’s regime;
real assault
was witnessing
a black drag queen
cut her throat in the cafeteria.
Tears, mascara.
A beat-up
hustler
grabbing her dick
in a miniskirt,
waltzing the Malecón.
The refusal,
a makeshift
buck knife. Her Poetry.
Pues, el texto
quedó
escrito en la nada.
Sleeping in an inner tube,
a bottle of rum
and a copy of the Illiad
you’d never have time to finish....
Torture by
cowardice,
literal steam.
Smiling, grotesque—
Three lost front teeth!
A ribald gap
prayed
for cliché—
by boat, plane or coffin,
San Lázaro. . .
On your birthday
in 85’,
indignity;
the new island.
A friend’s
gift-wrapped,
chic
amphora
of Troquemichel.
Such fucking generosity.
Rat poison!
You sat in that jail
eight years to begin
the end, in exile.
Like Achilles
dragging his corpse
through the alleys of NYC
covered in Kaposi’s,
your happiness
counterrevolutionary.
An insult.
A stranger to everyone.
Reading Prison
Furtive sweet Maurice.
Edmond, a petty thief.
Leon, smoking a cigarette.
Eugene, trolling the boulevard.
“The most passionate faun,”
young Giorgio, a Corsican.
Two boyfriend-fishermen
of the Northern Seine, Rafael,
and Fortuné. The spectacle!
Eyes like the night, a mouth
a scarlet flower;
Casquette, in a blue suit
and the young Russian, Maltchek
Perovinski, age 18. In 1900,
the year I’d die, I’d kiss
a 15-year old seminarian,
Giuseppe Luverde, behind the altar
of Cathedral Palermo; I was 47.
“What purple hours one can snatch. . . .
My mouth is twisted . . . I feed on fevers.”
And don’t forget André! And Pietro
“like a young St. John” on the left bank,
a quick walk from the Rue des Beaux Arts.
Edoardo Rolla, a dressed sailor—
An actor named Didaco, from Genoa!
And godlike curls, nameless in Rome!
