When I was One and Twenty...

A Villanelle for St. Valentine

2012-02-14T09:52:00.006-05:00

When I consider the curve of your cock
in even this mild, mathematical way,
I notice strange images start to knock.

Sticky things, mostly, and things made of rock.
A petrified marshmallow showed up today.
He either was stale, or scared by your cock.

So, I sent him away. A while back Bach
appeared at my door. He started to play
a sort of pipe organ. Bach did not knock.

Nor did his friends. He arrived with a flock
of cherry-faced cherubs and a golden bidet
with the weirdest fixtures—all curved like your cock.

Now, very few stores keep cherubs in stock,
which is why I thank God for Bach and eBay
whenever strange men with strange instruments knock.

And speaking of knocking, I think I forgot
to mention something. What I meant to say
concerned a key more than it did a cock.
This is for you. No need no more to knock.

1968

2012-02-13T12:38:00.014-05:00

Consider the following hypothetical.

If, one winter day in 1975, for instance, we were trapped inside Bryant Street by a murderous blizzard, if all of the roads and schools and businesses in Buffalo were closed, if we were keeping the heat low to conserve oil, if we were playing tic-tac-toe with polka-dot bean bags, and if my father and I were the Xs, and if my mother and Kyle were the Os, and if my father’s final throw slid across the frozen surface of the tic-tac-toe set and he accidentally tipped an O over, and if we lost, I cannot say that I felt unhappy.

Yes, I could try to weep and wail and gnash my teeth, if that would make people more comfortable. I could put on a gown of grief, pick up a microphone and perform the typical song of desolation. I daresay, I could conjure up all sorts of emotions in the breasts of barren old women. This is one of the first lessons one learns as a child: how to extort love and money with tears. But why should I do that? Since it is just the two of us here, and we are both children, why should I lie about my actual feelings? Especially when the truth is so much more poignant and bizarre.

I was delighted that we lost. I leapt across the living room with joy. I smiled as I turned the Xs and Os back over to blankness. I threw all of the bean bags back at my dad with such comical fury that everyone erupted into laughter.

I was pleased because, for a moment, I had all the ammunition. I had everyone pinned down, trapped in the living room, while I was in the frigid sun porch, where the game was actually set up.

I somersaulted back while dad passed half of the bean bags to mom. It was time to switch sides and start another game—my father pairing up with my brother—me with my mother—a much more lethal combination.

I was happy because the loss I suffered with my father confirmed in my mind something that I had long suspected: dad had also missed the My Lai Massacre in 1968.

Edwin stumbled into existence during the siege of Stalingrad in 1943. Too young for World War II, too young for Korea, and taunted for being too quiet, my father enlisted in the Marines in 1962 and spent a dull tour of duty setting up tents in Taiwan and motorcycling around Japan. He returned from Tokyo in 1966 with a tailor-made tuxedo, but no tattoos. He is more like my flat-footed grandfather than my uncles who invaded Guam.

The Vietnam War could not compete with the charms of North Tonawanda and my mother. He did not re-enlist.

In 1968, he earns his journeyman’s papers, working the late shift at Columbus-McKinnon, a manufacturer of cranes. This is the first year of their marriage. Dad does delicate operations with a drill press, peering through flexible green-tinted safety goggles at a block of something shiny. I see him blowing tiny steel corkscrews away.

I wish I could see him watching Star Trek in its original run on NBC, as we did later, both in the living room on Bryant Street and in his little trailer on River Road, when the show was in syndication.

Many conflicting visions of the future appeared on TV during that turbulent year. But, for me, and probably for me alone, nothing reflected on the screens of 1968 appears quite so strangely compelling as that vision of love my parents presented to the world in January. As I have mentioned elsewhere, I was born in September. Even 44 years later, I am sure my mother could tell you exactly what was on television when I was conceived—without consulting a single issue of TV Guide.

The Roman Empire

2012-02-11T21:33:00.079-05:00

Geographically, the left is almost identical to the right, except that there are paint chips in the flowerbeds, and, on the whole, life on the left seems slightly less civilized than next door. My home is a work in progress. Or maybe the word is regress. If you think of Rome in the 4th century—increasingly Christian, increasingly crumbly—you get the idea.

The brown façade of our duplex has 8 windows on the first floor, divided by 2 doors: 4 for my grandparents and 4 for us. Above that, on the second floor, 4 more windows face the street: 2 for my room and 2 my grandfather’s. Below the cicadas in the tree branches, you can hear his air conditioner hum.

A slightly recessed peak crowns our house. It is not so much a garret as a newspaper hat on a madman. 2 blind eyes stare blankly at the sky. In lieu of a corpus callosum, a layer of lath and plaster divides the attic into two compartments: the conscious and subconscious mind. Each contains relics. Mine also contains aliens—silver invisibilities—gigantic garbage cans with serrated steel teeth. If you step on their feet, their mouths open up. They eat anything—including babies. If you listen very carefully, you can hear them crunching Christmas ornaments at night.

The residence of the soul remains a mystery. I have a feeling it lives in the walls we share—in the hot and cold whispers of air mixing in the conduits of our separate furnaces—our separate lives—in the grilles and grates through which we communicate—if it exists anywhere at all.

So much for my body and soul. The rule here is bilateral symmetry, as it is with most living things on planet Earth. The external line of division between the 2 dwellings is represented by a walkway, disfigured by the stumps of 2 melted crayons—a red and yellow cross—an orange nail in the middle—marking for future generations where my first experiments in light and color were performed.

Stepping over an abandoned magnifying glass and a gold and green box of Crayolas—still open, 2 crayons still missing—we walk with a man (a boy, really, from my present perspective) across the lawn. On the left, around the corner, I point out the gas and electric meter—a sort of octopus with numbers for eyes. When he squats to read our rates of consumption, I watch his t-shirt rise from his teal trousers, revealing a milky slit of skin: an arrow of peach fuzz points down to a new magnetic pole on my compass—one I have never quite noticed before.

When he is finished reading the figures, I ask him if he would take like to take a look at my furnace, too. He smiles. He says, no. He says that he only measures people’s electricity and gas. We have oil heat, he explains, leading me to a greasy fixture a little further along the foundation of the house. I will have to wait for the oilman and his pink hose, it seems. I thank him for coming by and we shake hands. I must have looked disappointed, because he turns around on the driveway and he waves goodbye with his clipboard.

Depressed by his departure—my brother is off having surgery, so I only have my shadow for company—I pick up a twig to sharpen and plant myself on the cold patio. I sit down rather hard and perhaps the faint impression my fanny made on the concrete is still visible. All I know for sure is that we have no chairs over here today. We have no picnic table. Worse, have no garden. Our decrepit garage takes up too much room. Only children grow here, apparently.

My bewildered brother celebrates his first birthday in this very spot in 1971, enthroned on the aluminum and vinyl highchair I have never quite outgrown. I do not remember being invited to his party, although I am sure that I was. It would have been foolish to hire a babysitter to sit with me in the house when everyone else was outside having such a disgusting blast: flinging cake, wallowing in ice cream and pouring out Pepsi. My birthday is scheduled for the following month—September—when I will turn 2—so I am not the star on this occasion. That is probably why I did not preserve the invitation.

I am sure that somebody took a picture of Kyle, which is why I recall the event today. For his sake, I hope the album containing it hasn’t been lost. If it has, these few paragraphs will have to suffice for a snapshot. In a way, I suppose I am like those imaginary aliens in the attic, with one important difference: I am not imaginary. If you step on my foot, even accidentally, I can assure you, I will scream. I might even bite you. It all depends on how big you are and how hungry I am for a spanking.

But if you lock me in a padded cell—a comfortable place like my apartment—if you let me lie down and close my eyes, I can block out the howling maniac in my head. I can hear a chorus singing ‘Happy Birthday.’ If you put a piece of paper on my face, I will blow it off, swing my feet off the bed, pick it up, and use whatever crayons I have stashed under my mattress to draw you a picture. I will begin with a pointed party hat decorated with tiny dancing zebras, rhinoceri, leopards, lions, apes, giraffes and other savage beasts—creatures of the Coliseum—all blowing frilly noisemakers.

My mother beams behind the new Emperor, adjusting his dunce cap for posterity. There is frosting on his face and a fine line of elastic running down his right ear. A drop of vanilla dimples his chin. I see an extinguished candle, too—white with turquoise edges—shaped like the number 1 in the foreground.

I have seen that number somewhere before: maybe in another picture, at another party, sprouting up from the remains of another birthday cake like some lonely column—left over from the temple of Castor and Pollux—in the Forum.

The marble rubble of my Imperium.

I snap the twig.

Back when I commanded the love and allegiance of home.

About Poets

2012-01-29T18:17:00.003-05:00

Our words are nothing to live by:
You cannot drink a syllable,
Whatever your capacity.
We say that love will never die
Because the truth is terrible.
Time winks at our mendacity.

So, we tend to be soft-spoken.
We tell dirty jokes, we smile,
We see that no one cries alone.
For this, we may receive a token
For the Ferryman’s turnstile,
To pay for passage, when we’re gone.

Henry A. Norris

2012-01-24T16:50:00.022-05:00

Horologist
1906-1970

Maybe the best relationships
are based on little lies.
I know you had a shop,
I know you repaired watches,
dad showed me your workbench:

a bright light up above,
below, a field of felt—
—Elysian fields, maybe—
a million little drawers
full of tiny, shiny parts

that would keep better time.
I see this all quite vividly—
down to the oil atomizer
wearing chain mail.
I told him I remembered

sharing cookies with you.
I was 2 the year you died.
I lied. It would have killed him
to hear the truth. So, I shared
cookies with my grandfather.

I think you’d understand
the great necessity of lies
in love. In art. The spring,
the perfect movement, moment,
the whole idea of time.

So, let this be our secret.
I have no memory of
your cookies or your face.
But every line I write
today contains your name.

I saw it on your workbench.
There it shall remain.

Amphibians

2012-01-18T13:18:00.035-05:00

My first exposure to this class of animalia came in the form of an ancient iron bullfrog with a maroon rubber gasket and an orange hole installed in his posterior.

After screwing the shiny brass end of a long green garden hose into his sphincter, my grandmother carried him around the corner of the house, and dumped him about 10 yards from her bed of white-purple-pink pansies on the front lawn. Then she returned to the spigot. My brother and I sweated expectantly on our naked haunches—ready to spring on her sprinkler at a moment’s notice. I noticed my brother’s back was striped with shadows. To the vultures on the telephone wires, we must have looked like tigers crouching in the grass.

Heaven only knows what the frog was thinking. He stared straight ahead, as if he had other, more pressing matters than tigers on his mind: namely, the location of my grandmother. Instead of blasting his entrails across the street—as an inept poet would do—leaving frog intestines hanging from the audience’s unfortunate faces—with one vigorous twist of her fist, my grandmother forced this fossil of the 1950s to cough up his rusty guts and resume spitting rainbows across creation.

Greedy children that we were, I suppose you could say that Kyle and I wrestled for the sky that day, dividing the rainbows between us, sousing each other with laughter. We left our grandmother’s thirsty flowers safely unmolested: behind the shallow ditches that marked their borders—their beds—immersed in nutritious mud.

It was an ingenious lesson in pleasure—one that I never forgot—and one that I will deliver to a few spaced-out friends in the dungeon of a sexclub in the Meat-Packing District in the not-so-distant future: where pansies are still almost entirely dependent on hoses and the kindness of a few quirky old ladies for care.

Telescope

2012-01-17T17:10:00.017-05:00

Our source of illumination resides in a suburban side street of an obscure galaxy. You will notice it over there—next to Andromeda. The local star—or, Sun, as the system’s inhabitants call it—sits at the center of a swirling conspiracy of clouds, approximately 93 million miles from a mysterious embryo presently coalescing from comets, hydrocarbons, gas and dust, iron and silicon, and other odds and ends left over from The Big Bang.

It may take of eons of patient fiddling, but once I have adjusted my knobs to the proper celestial coordinates, you should be able to see a few plucky photons colliding with a surprisingly lovely little planet, the home world of the human race: a gorgeous globe, completely unique in my experience—green with plants, gray with clouds, and blue with water.

Vivid as it appears to us today, due to the extreme distances involved and the lugubrious speed of light, there is every chance that what we see before us has already evaporated into the void: every tear has fallen, every smile has been erased, the seven seas, once crowded with mackerel, have boiled off into oblivion. There is every possibility that nothing now remains of the Earth except for cinders.

Until the light catches up with facts on the ground, we cannot know for sure. Until then, the Earth will remain as exactly as we see it now, silently spinning, shimmering with magnificence in every atomic detail: from dusk to dawn—across the lawn—to a tree almost eclipsed by the sunset—a trunk almost the exact size and shape and texture of a particular tree I always tried but failed to embrace as a boy.

Perhaps you have seen it yourself, while passing through Buffalo, looking for a good time. One more slight adjustment and a walnut is plainly visible: in July, through the northwest quadrant of a pane of glass (second floor, double-glazed window on the extreme left, mine) at an angle of 15° above the western horizon.

That is me—lifting a filthy screen and poking my face out of the frame, so I can get a closer look at the leaves. I should introduce myself. I am your telescope. I am not a reliable witness to subsequent events because my field of view is so narrow.

As you can see, the world in question still revolves around me and I am having trouble sleeping. When I get bored with watching the stars come out through the leaves—they all look the same nowadays—I go downstairs to my parents and complain.

They are sitting on the couch in the living room watching The Mod Squad or something. I do see people running through some sort of tunnel. Maybe they are photons. Whatever they are, I don’t really care. I am the star here, so I step in front of the TV. My three-year-old brother is whimpering again after his surgery. (Glittering scalpel, lazy blue eyeball.) He has been whining for the last hour. I ask if I can go next door and spend the night.

My mother says nothing, but quickly unfolds her legs and goes upstairs to check on Kyle. My father sighs. He stands. He turns me upside down in front of the Zenith, stashes me under his arm, and marches through the living room into another—even dimmer—room, where he sets me down gently and presses a black pasteboard button. Another button pops out of the wall and lux fiat.

In a flash, I am straddling two worlds—the orange carpet in the kitchen and the olive one in the dining room—Hell and Heaven—Heaven and Hell—the difference can be hard to tell without a look at the thermometer. 75°. Fahrenheit or Celsius? Let’s have another look. The thermostat doesn’t say. All I do know for certain is that it is hot, I am almost 5 and I am looking up at my father with awe while he lifts the telephone receiver from its cradle and starts dialing.

The next morning, around 8:30—aroused by the distant squeak of a mattress spring, followed by tip-toes, flushing, tip-toes, silence, and then some inexplicable giggles—the nosy scent of coffee nudges a door open to see if I am up to no good. I am not. I am sitting Indian-style in my grandmother’s pastel dressing room, reading random entries aloud to myself from a 26 volume set of books—A Child’s Encyclopedia—that once belonged to my mother.

You might say that this is Volume T. T is my middle initial. T is where we discover ourselves today.

Photographs

2012-01-10T12:32:00.010-05:00

I seldom see anything
worth preserving which I can’t
imagine when I close my eyes:

the infinitely tender way
the wind ruffles lakes to the texture
of aluminum foil—how

I would smooth the foil
left over from my baloney
sandwich—flatten it

with my fist, then fold it in
a silver square. How I’d forget it,
until mom forced me to yank

my pockets inside out—
looking for forgotten pens—
on Laundry Day.

Drama, Updated

2012-01-07T22:42:00.033-05:00

The curtain rises on our stage. Looked at from the street, Comedy and Tragedy are relatives, who—for reasons of economy—live together in very close proximity, in fact, side by side.

For now, all you really need to know about the characters depicted in the unfolding drama is that two families have been cast here by Fate. The set consists of a duplex dwelling that was converted from a carriage house early in the 20th Century. Our family purchased their property in 1970, the year my brother was born. We live on the left, at number 139, my grandparents on the right, at 137.

On the right side, you will see a victory garden, less ambitious than the one tended by Mr. Crockett on PBS, perhaps, but full of treasures nevertheless: cucumbers, peppers, rhubarb, carrots, parsnips, tomatoes, onions, and chives. This is where I dug up a crusty dime minted in 1857.

Beside the garden, there is a pleasant patio full of potted plants sheltered by a large corrugated aluminum awning. Here, men with aquamarine anchors tattooed to their hairy forearms are invited to smoke—veterans of campaigns in the Pacific—exiting with a discrete cough through a side door.

They would never be left alone with their cigarettes, however. These men were always attended by my grandfather. He would excuse himself from the living room like this:

“If all you gals are going to do is gossip, I’m going outside to smoke with Jim.”

“Francis, one of these days, I am going to hit you over the head,” my grandmother would hiss.

Francis was not a smoker himself, or a drinker, or a veteran anything, actually, except for my grandmother’s rolling pin, Chinese checkers and the vinyl chloride vats of Goodyear. (Enlarged heart, flat feet, 4F. Sorry, son.)

According to family tradition, it is possible that—in revenge for the rolling pin—my grandfather broke my grandmother’s nose at the time of The Cuban Missile Crisis in October of 1962: the fatal day Florence snuck up, leaned over Francis’s silent figure and shouted, “Boo!” as he was dozing on the davenport.

I do not think any malice was intended. From the way she rolled her eyes when he told the story, I gathered that he accidently struck her in the face with his fist when she frightened him out of his wits.

Besides, violence would have been completely out of character for him, if not for my grandmother. She was a different sort of creature altogether. Florence once threw a croquet mallet at my mother as she ran out of the happy home they inhabited during the Eisenhower administration.

When I asked her why anyone would want to throw a croquet mallet at her, my mother looked up from the jaws of the ceramic shark she was painting (a bank, a future Christmas present for me, it turns out) and she said that she didn’t know. She said she was a perfect child. She invited me to ask my grandmother about the incident. I immediately turned on my heels and stomped out of the house like the Spanish Inquisition. I rang the bell (which I never did) and my grandmother answered the door. She was pickling beets. She led me up the back stairs.

“Why did you ring the bell?”

“Why did you throw a croquet mallet at my mother?”

She turned and squinted and looked me straight in the eye and said, “Because she deserved it.”

Having been spanked with a wooden spoon by my mother on more than one occasion, I could accept that. I sat down on the steel and rubber step stool my grandmother used to reach the upper shelves in her pantry (where she kept mason jars) as she decanted a can of Spicy Hot V-8 in an orange juice glass. She gave it to me and went back to stirring her cauldron.

My grandmother might have made a spectacular witch, as my grandfather often alleged, but she was a terrible shot and had no sense of timing: the mallet crashed through a pane of glass in their old screen door instead of hitting my mother. I also adore Spicy Hot V-8 juice and did as a child.

A loving husband and a caring father, I have always felt that my grandfather—uncle Franny, as he is known to my cousins—played the role of pater familias and gracious host to perfection. He will succumb to cancer while I am holding his hand.

With that same hand, on a rickety wooden gardening table, beside the clean blade of a spade my grandmother used for transferring her plants to larger pots, he would habitually place a chipped ashtray decorated with tiny, indeterminate flowers. On the reverse side, the glaze bore the mysterious legend, ‘Made In Occupied Japan.’

This was the one ashtray that my uncle John refused to use. He preferred to use another one in the living room, one that my grandfather reserved for his butterscotch candy wrappers. For some reason I could never fully fathom—maybe because he had a reputation for being more ornery than everyone else—the only visitor allowed to smoke in my grandparents’ house was uncle John, a recently retired shoe salesman. I loved him for that. When he insisted, nobody resisted.

As you might imagine, the day uncle John died was something of a disaster—especially for him. I heard the phone ring in the kitchen. I followed the blur my grandmother formed as she whizzed by me—as she tripped, running up the front stairs, shouting, “Dad, Dad!” When she was forced to complete her ascent by crawling on her knees, bawling like a baby, I almost laughed. I had never seen an adult behave like a child before.

I thought my grandfather might have agreed. I am not sure that he did. He stood—dentureless—in a pair of periwinkle pajama bottoms and a V-neck t-shirt on the second floor landing—trying to make sense of things.

He was getting ready for work. Third shift.

“Ma, Ma, what is it?”

With wet hands, he lifted her gently by her elbows from where she knelt. While I am sure it took only a few seconds, it seemed like an eternity had to pass before my grandmother could gather her head together sufficiently to blurt out, “Oh, Francis, John is dead. He had a heart attack.” I had no idea what a heart attack was, but it sounded pretty serious to me, even worse than death.

I dropped the chain of multicolored plastic monkeys I had painstakingly connected on the carpet and was about to dispose of in their home—a brown plastic barrel. Suddenly, I felt like crying, too.

In fact, I did cry. So did my brother.

We had no idea what was going on. Uncle John had never died before. Nobody in our family had ever died until that day—not to my knowledge. What are you supposed to do under such circumstances?

Once my grandfather had inserted his clean teeth—grimacing in the mirror, pressing a thumb against his upper plate, making sure it was sealed against his gums strongly enough to resist the forces of gravity and permit difficult conversations—he closed the door. This time, I sat on the stairs. I heard a tap gushing into the sink. He emerged a few minutes later clad in a pair of dark slacks, a white shirt and a sea-gray acrylic cardigan with a black Greek meander design dancing up both sleeves. He smelled ever so faintly of Barbasol.

After making a few quick phone calls, my grandmother drifted off to her bedroom, sobbing again, selecting something suitable to wear to my aunt’s. My grandfather tied my brother’s shoes while she took her turn in the bathroom.

He took us next door and explained the situation to my mother, before driving my grandmother to stay with her sister, aunt Midge, and then on to work. He always kept an extra pair of work clothes in the trunk of his car.

As I had already eaten dinner, I rejected the trembling dish of goulash my hysterical mother offered to calm me down. My brother was not a liver fan, so he may have sampled some. That, I don’t remember.

You see, I was 7, which I had always been led to believe was a lucky number.

Now, I was confused. What did the death of uncle John mean for the blackberry bushes that grew next to his garage? Would aunt Midge allow me to continue to pick them? Would the proprietors dim the pink and blue neon bowling ball at Rojek’s on Payne Avenue, two doors down the street from the chilly house with the lemon trim where my aunt and uncle lived? Would Principal Baker order the flag at Grant Elementary School to flap quietly at half-staff for a few days? Would President Ford address the nation? What kind of future did I have to look forward to? Would there be nuclear war?

I wanted answers. Unable to articulate my actual desires, I asked for a Windmill cookie. Only my grandfather ate those, of course, and he was carefully backing down the driveway, trying to avoid the swing set he had once almost demolished with his Buick. In other words, we didn’t have any Windmills in our house. Or answers.

By way of a compromise, my mother peeled a Ho-Ho and placed it on a plate, still half-wrapped in tinfoil. It rolled to the edge, paused, and then rolled back to the middle, glittering at the center of a flower fringed universe like a gilded turd. I didn’t want a Ho-Ho. I was told to stop being a brat or go to bed. I opted for brattiness and went to bed. It was already after 8:00 p.m., anyway. I saw no reason to sit in the kitchen and sulk.

38 hours later, a prophylactic whisper in the funeral home foyer informed me that my favorite uncle had passed away on his porch, napping beneath The North Tonawanda News, after eating a basket of fish and chips at Arthur Treacher’s.

I may not like liars, but I have always admired a lie told with élan. My mother could always manage that. She took no chances. Out of the air, she plucked a pen that seemed to be swinging rather too freely in space and time from a chain of brass BBs fixed to a little pulpit. She signed for all three of us: Edwin, Kathleen, Eric and Kyle. She laid the pen to rest in the shadowy valley between the pages of the Visitors Book before she led my brother and myself to the casket.

My father was at work. My mother said he would be dropping by to add his name to the book later.

Maybe

2012-01-05T17:55:00.003-05:00

Maybe I do love you.
Unless I believe in you,
you cannot hurt me.
Until then what are you?
A mouth. An ass. A joke.
A hole of such hilarity
your slightest whisper makes
me fart with laughter.

I mention this because
I love you. Before you speak,
look in your mirror, dear,
and ask yourself, honestly,
“What can I say to him,
what can I hope to do,
he hasn’t done already,
when he believed in you?”

Leonardo In The Marketplace

2012-01-03T14:49:00.033-05:00

He nicked the skin on purpose, to release
the light. Scented by the lemon he held,
the little half-moons of his fingernails
glowed this morning. When he sniffed the rind,

the odor of a memory—a spoiled
uterus—left his nostrils: a young girl
he dissected, with difficulty, last night. She
died giving birth to twins, two boys. He was glad

they lived. He took the time to sketch her hands.
They were particularly delicate, lilac, even
rendered in red chalk. He wondered why
we must turn blue in death? He wasn’t sure. He tossed

his lemon in the air and caught a song
above the cartwheels and the coughs. “How much
for the goldfinch?” he asked. Bird and man,
both cocked their heads. The Florentine named

his price. Leonardo paid. He had no wish
to haggle over prices. Wicked cages.
The pages of his notebooks were bad enough
imprisonment. He might tie wings to men,

but there the similarity of men
to birds ended. He could set finches free.

2011 Readings

2011-12-25T12:01:00.006-05:00

Since it is that time of year when we make lists, here is my list of readings for 2011. It is full of old favorites, new voices, and fascinating discoveries just waiting to be made in each and every book. (I will try to provide links later.)

1. Kusamakura–Soseki Natsume

2. The Heredity of Taste–Soseki Natsume

3. The 210^th Day–Soseki Natsume

4. Kokoro–Soseki Natsume

5. To The Spring Equinox and Beyond–Soseki Natsume

6. My Individualism–Soseki Natsume

7. The Anatomy of Melancholy–Robert Burton

8. Coriolanus

9. World Within Walls: Japanese Literature of the Pre-Modern Era–Donald Keene

10. The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches–Matsuo Basho

11. 4 Plays: Amphitryon, Menaechmi, The Pot of Gold, The Haunted House–Plautus

12. Mother Clapp’s Molly House–Mark Ravenhill

13. Techne’s Clearinghouse–John Foy

14. Seven Studies For A Self Portrait–Jee Leong Koh

15. 4 Plays–Ben Jonson

16. Collected Satires of Juvenal

17. Satires of Horace and Persius

18. Turn–Wendy Chin-Tanner

19. Road Work Ahead–Raymond Luczak

20. My Life As Adam–Bryan Borland

21. Burnings–Ocean Vuong

22. The Satyricon and Apocolocyntosis–Petronius and Seneca

23. Collected Poems of James Merrill

24. The Gift–Vladimir Nabokov

25. Strong Opinions–Vladimir Nabokov

26. Pale Fire–Vladimir Nabokov

27. The Common Reader, First Series–Virginia Woolf

28. Nothing Like The Sun–Anthony Burgess

29. The Young Michelangelo: A Biography–John Spike

30. QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter–Richard A. Feynman

31. Paradise Lost–John Milton

32. The Birds and Other Plays–Aristophanes

33. Selected Poems–James Fenton

34. Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume 1–Ben Bova, editor

35. Pompeii–Robert Harris

36. The Difference Engine–William Gibson and Bruce Sterling

37. Collected Short Stories–Rudyard Kipling

38. Selected Short Stories–H.G. Wells

39. Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form–Helen Vendler

40. Collected Short Stories–Ambrose Bierce

41. Selected Essays of Montaigne

42. Areopagitica–John Milton

43. Broca’s Brain–Carl Sagan

44. The Dyer’s Hand–W.H. Auden

45. Satori Blues–Cyril Wong

Drama

2011-12-17T11:14:00.018-05:00

Looked at from the street, Comedy and Tragedy are relatives, who—for reasons of economy—live together, side by side.

For now, all you really need to know about the characters depicted in the unfolding drama is that two families have been cast here by Fate. The set consists of a duplex dwelling that was converted from a carriage house early in the 20^th Century. Our family purchased their palace (It needs a little work. But you will love it.) in 1970, the year my brother was born. We live on the left, at number 139, my grandparents on the right, at 137.

On the right side, the audience will see a victory garden, less ambitious than the one tended by Mr. Crockett on PBS, perhaps, but full of treasures nevertheless: cucumbers, peppers, rhubarb, carrots, parsnips, tomatoes, onions, and chives. This is where I dug up a crusty dime minted in 1857.

Beside the garden, there is a pleasant patio full of potted plants sheltered by a large corrugated aluminum awning. Here, men with aquamarine anchors tattooed to their hairy forearms are invited to smoke—veterans of campaigns in the Pacific—exiting with a discrete cough through a side door.

They would never be left alone with their cigarettes, however. These men were always carefully attended by my grandfather. He would excuse himself from the living room like this:

“If all you gals are going to do is gossip, I’m going outside to smoke with Jim.”

“Francis, one of these days, I am going to hit you over the head,” my grandmother would hiss.

Francis was not a smoker himself, or a drinker, or a veteran anything, actually, except for my grandmother’s rolling pin, Chinese checkers and the vinyl chloride vapors of Goodyear. (Enlarged heart, flat feet, 4F. Sorry, son.) Still, he played the role of gracious host to perfection. He will succumb to cancer while I am holding his hand.

For some reason I could never fully fathom—maybe because he was more ornery than everyone else—the only visitor allowed to smoke in the house was my uncle John, a recently retired shoe salesman. When he insisted, nobody resisted.

When my grandmother tripped, running up the stairs, shouting, “Dad, Dad!” I smiled. When she was forced by grief to complete her journey by crawling on aching knees, bawling like a baby, I almost laughed. I had never seen my grandmother act like a child before. I thought my grandfather agreed. He stood—dentureless—in a pair of periwinkle pajama bottoms and a V-neck t-shirt on the second floor landing—trying to make sense of things.

He was getting ready for work. Third shift.

“Ma, Ma, what is it?”

He lifted her gently by her elbows from where she knelt. While I am sure it took only a few seconds, it seemed like an eternity had to pass before my grandmother could gather her wits together sufficiently to blurt out, “Oh, Francis, John is dead. He had a heart attack.” I had no idea what a heart attack was, but it sounded pretty serious to me, even worse than death.

Suddenly, I felt like crying, too.

In fact, I did cry. So did my brother. I think we were watching Jeopardy! when the phone rang. The tangy scent of fried liver and onions hung in the air. My grandmother was in the kitchen, singing something incomprehensibly lovely, as was her habit, when doing anything dull, like washing dishes.

We had no idea what was going on. Uncle John had never died before. Nobody in our family ever had died until that day—not to my knowledge. What are you supposed to do under such circumstances?

After my grandfather inserted his clean teeth—grimacing in the mirror, pressing a thumb against his upper plate, making sure it was sealed against his gums strongly enough to resist the forces of gravity and permit difficult conversations—he closed the door. I sat on the stairs. I heard a tap gushing into the sink. He emerged a few minutes later clad in a pair of dark slacks, a white shirt and a sea-gray acrylic sweater with a Greek meander design dancing up the sleeves. He smelled ever so faintly of Barbasol.

After making a few quick phone calls, my grandmother drifted off to her bedroom, sobbing again, selecting something suitable to wear to my Aunt’s. My grandfather tied my brother’s shoes while she took her turn in the bathroom.

He took us next door and explained the situation to my mother, before driving my grandmother to stay with her sister, Aunt Midge, and then on to work. He always kept an extra pair of work clothes in the trunk of his car.

As I had already eaten dinner, I rejected the trembling dish of goulash my hysterical mother offered to calm me down. My brother was not a liver fan, so he may have sampled some. That, I don’t remember.

You see, I was confused. I wanted an explanation. Unable to articulate my actual desires, I asked for a Windmill cookie instead. Only my grandfather ate those, of course, and he was backing down the driveway: we didn’t have any.

By way of a compromise, my mother peeled a Ho-Ho and placed it on a plate, still half-wrapped in tinfoil. I didn’t want a Ho-Ho. I was told to stop being a brat or go to bed. I opted for brattiness and went to bed. It was already after 8:00pm, anyway. I saw no reason to sit in the kitchen and sulk.

48 hours later, a prophylactic whisper in the funeral home foyer informed me that my favorite uncle had passed away quietly on his porch, napping beneath The North Tonawanda News, after eating fish and chips at Arthur Treacher’s.

I may not like liars, but I have always admired a lie told with élan. This is part of the appeal of fiction. My mother plucked a pen out of the air that seemed to be swinging rather too freely in space and time from a chain of brass BBs fixed to little a pulpit. She signed for all three of us: Kathleen, Eric and Kyle. She carefully laid the pen to rest in the shadowy valley between the pages of the Visitors Book before she led us to the casket.

My father was at work. He would be dropping by to sign the book and pay his respects to Reality later.

Relativity

2011-12-16T10:54:00.058-05:00

The shadow of a spectacular sunset seems to be following me. Let us call this apparition a sliced mandarin—a cross section—the fruit of memory—an orange orb whose radial interior segments resemble a star—or—for the purposes of this disjointed memoir—Exhibit A.

From my perspective—my plane of reference—the sunset never occurs. The blade never falls. Although, of course, from where you sit, it does. It must. The frozen moment exists in a rectangular wooden frame, where past and future elide into the present—your decision to continue turning pages—to pull the rope and release the guillotine.

I hope you will continue reading. The end of this book will come as a tremendous relief: even the smallest stars can weigh quite heavily upon the shoulders. But whatever you decide to do, the scene I am describing will remain—for me, anyway—the last lovely thing I see: perpetually visible in July, through the northwest quadrant of a pane of glass (second floor, double-glazed window on the extreme left, mine) at an angle of 20 degrees above the western horizon.

Our source of illumination resides at the center of an obscure planetary system approximately 93 million miles from the world I inhabit—hardly a bunny hop through the void—yet an incalculable distance from the walnut tree lit by those long fingertips of light caressing my face. What I cannot understand is why my green and gold friend should have been marked for execution. What kind of crimes against nature must a tree commit to be cut down—to be turned into poetry: pulp, toilet paper, trash—that worst of all possible worlds—Art?

I imagine that arboreal being produced nuts edible only to squirrels. I assume that the immense crowd of furry creatures which gathered beneath its boughs autumn—hypnotized by hunger—presented a menace to public health. So, in the dead of night, an ordinance was passed: that tree must die. I can only scratch my ass in wonder and move on.

Although I am sure a transcript exists on microfilm somewhere in Erie County—evil decisions are always reached and recorded in excruciating detail by The Authorities—I must confess that I was not privy to the deliberations of our City Fathers in 1970, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, or 78—the last year I occupied the front bedroom I am presently haunting.

In other words, I am 5. I am a shadow of my former self. I am not a reliable witness to subsequent events. I peer at them like Alice—through the looking glass—darkly. I cannot be called to testify in court—either for the prosecution or the defense. I take no sides in the dispute between The Town of North Tonawanda and the squirrels, my mother or my father, their divorce, up and down, forward and back, left and right.

I am sorry to be so evasive, but as you can see, this was an unusually hot summer. I couldn’t help tossing and turning. Since my three-year-old brother was constantly whimpering after his surgery (glittering scalpel, baby-blue eyeball,) I spent most nights perspiring in bed next door, wedged between my grandmother and the moon.

Each morning, the nosy scent of coffee would nudge a door open, and discover me sitting Indian-style in her pastel dressing room, reading random entries aloud to myself from a 10 volume set of books, A Child’s Encyclopedia, that once belonged to my mother.

[Turning back a page.]

The spot of doom handed down by the Aldermen—in this case, Exhibit B—was in reality a dark blue circle spray-painted on thick rough bark. I know the circle was round and that it was blue because it looked like the bumpy steering wheel my grandfather’s soft hands gripped in his Buick while I sat next to him, spitting the pits of sour cherries into a glossy brown paper bag.

I know the bark was rough because it scratched my arms whenever I embraced the trunk as a child, seeing if could comprehend its entire texture. I never could. I was too small. I lacked the reach. Now that I am older—I am 43 as of this writing—I notice that my embrace is wider. I am tempted to try the walnut again today.

Nobody is here now, except us ghosts, so let’s see what happens.

Hold on.

Here goes.

We see from the street view on Google maps that the tree has disappeared. The squirrels have scattered. The new residents of Bryant Street have dipped my delicious chocolate house (there is no more tempting form of cocoa, in my experience, than those last few peeling flakes of lead paint) into a vat of hideous vanilla siding that tastes today—more or less—like total oblivion.

Which is all just my elliptical way of saying—apart from a pair of geographical coordinates—a general shape around the eyes—everything familiar about me is gone.

Pearl Harbor at 70

2011-12-07T09:48:00.007-05:00

70 years ago today the Imperial Japanese Navy struck the Pacific port of Pearl Harbor.

7 years ago today, with the help of my Japanese boyfriend, Takaaki, America and Japan settled the last few lingering issues of the terrible conflict that began that placid Sunday morning in Hawaii. We did it with words. We did it with poetry. Here is how we achieved a lasting peace.

Takaaki, Part II

Becoming human takes a bit of time.
Nobody knows exactly how we do it.
We classify the clock as the enzyme—
the universal catalyst. Through it
we cease to be that seemingly divine
lump of life we call ‘a child.’ Fine.
We can cope with children pretty well.
What gives geneticists heartburn from Hell,
however, are the differing results
we get. When something evil as a rule
shows up with a small army at the pool,
shooting all the judges, most adults
completely fall to pieces. Like that helps.
Now, evil can compete with Michael Phelps.

The cruel careers of our worst instincts are
Olympic in brutality, but short—
if measured by the life of stone or star.
Were we less human, we might not resort
to good or evil. They’d be words—like stones
and stars. The sea would not be free of bones,
but bones would be more beautiful, like sand
twinkling between alien toes stand-
ing on Coney Island, where the old Cyclone—
the roller coaster—clatters up and down.
The salty waves would still drift in, surround
small feet. Bad children would be taken home.
The sea would sparkle—conscience cold and clear.
Only you and I would disappear.

Some distance back time in this scene is set,
inside a vast apartment—glass, concrete
and steel—accessed by elevators. Let
the windows start in Brooklyn, stretch to meet
The Empire State behind a candle, where
I swivel in a large black leather chair,
while your eye continues traveling
along gray glass, skyscrapers unraveling,
until the pointy tip of the Chrysler Buil-
-ding gently lifts Lexington Avenue,
piercing a silver nitrate mist. Now you
must let this scintillating picture fill
the space before your eyes: that is New York.
Here, I transfix a carrot with a fork.

“I will never tire of this view,” I say,
blowing on my steaming vegetable,
adding, “Totemo oishikatta ne,”
confidently in Nihon-go, able
to tell Takaaki I enjoy his curry
without entangling my tongue in worry.
“It’s okay,” he shrugs, quietly deferring
my compliments—as usual preferring
a tilted head, a seated bow, the nicer
show of manners honored in Japan
which can seem strange to the American
inclined to linger too much over dinner,
allowing food to cool and candles run.
Before I’d started, Taka-chan was done.

Except for these two mushrooms which
he pushed off to one side—not even tried—
two huge shitakes that he didn’t wish
to eat. Or share. They looked okay. I’d
eat them. From a Doraemon candy tin,
Takaaki took a cigarette. A thin
wisp of smoke and hiss rose from his plate
to celebrate our ninety-seventh date.
“What should we do tonight,” I inquired,
“Go bowling? I’ll do anything you like.
Get drunk? Get naked?” [Silence.] “Steal a bike?”
“I swam forty laps today. I’m wired.”
He exhaled, emitting a dry laugh,
“Shall we play Scrabble, then, and then have bath?”

The carrot on my fork released a drop
of curry with a thick and oily splash.
The very second my utensil stopped,
I discerned, across the table, a flash—
something which I hadn’t seen before—
metallic—worth investigating?—or
maybe not: a passenger aircraft
hovering above New Jersey as it passed
behind Takaaki’s silhouette, gliding in
to Kennedy, LaGuardia, Newark—
nothing necessary to report.
A zero. Nothing nasty hiding in
those pink puffs of lead behind his head—
those distant thunderclouds, I should have said.

“Have bath sounds good. But Scrabble, I will pass.
You always win, you creep. You clearly cheat,”
I said, “It’s obvious. You won the last
nine times. You’re not going to defeat
me for time number ten tonight.” I put
my foot down firmly. There. Takaaki’s butt
he then extinguished in the blob of sauce
that recently had claimed his match. “You lost
because you play without strategy.
There is no need for me to cheat,” he sighed,
as if I were an insect on his thigh
too insignificant to crush—a flea.
“You waste time making interesting word—
not the word that wins.” My mouth conferred

a moment with a chunk of chicken dyed
cadmium by turmeric—the curry.
Then I swallowed. “I have always tried
to think of Scrabble with you as purely
educational. It is my wish
to help you in enlarging your English
vocabulary. And defeating you—
too easily—as surely I must do—
would only be embarrassing. I know
how sensitive to that Nihon-jin are.
Destruction on a Scrabble board would mar
our beautiful relationship.” “Honto?
It sounds like Maru-chan’s afraid to play.”
“If you want to play with words, okay.”

(Maru-chan, or “Little Maru” is
the new nickname by which I’m known
in Japanese. I really don’t exist
in English anymore—except at home.
Maru works best for me as a suffix
to Kobayashi—a fictitious ship—
the bane of all Starfleet cadets, but one.
The Kobayashi Maru ranks among
his greatest triumphs. Though Kirk’s victory
pales before my own: I am the first
to turn the Kobayashi into verse—
in one of those strange twists of history.
Present me a no-win scenario,
I get the rules. Then change the game. Let’s go.

“The Kobayashi Maru is a test
of character. There is no way to win.
We simulate a vessel in distress,
hull breached, an icy vacuum pouring in.
During rescue operations, a surprise
Klingon assault destroys you—Enterprise.
The purpose of this mission is to face
fear—certain death. Logic indicates
we should get started. This is Judgment Day.
You will be graded by computer. I
am the computer. Any questions? Try
to die with dignity. Dismissed.” Okay,
Takaaki, you be Spock. You are aware
computers can be—hmm—re-programmed?) There

Takaaki tapped a second cigarette
on Dora-chan’s bountiful blue tin.
I went on eating, watching the sun set
like some enormous, obvious omen.
A hungry hush settled on our table
until a tulip petal quite incapable
of hanging on fell to my straw placemat
softly. Ten long minutes passed like that—
so painfully they felt more like twenty.
I drew bananas in my curry sauce
while Taka-chan established who was boss.
Then he offered, “More?” “I’ve had plenty.
Thanks.” I roll the tulip petal from
the mat between forefinger and thumb

contemplatively as Takaaki takes
dishes to the kitchen. In the glass—
his picture windows—I assessed the stakes.
I watched Takaaki work—efficient as
a machine—feeding things to Tupperware
containers, fridge and freezer over there.
I should be helping to put things away.
But I am lazy—what else can I say?
When I see him stationed at the sink,
I drink the dregs of my cold barley tea,
then saunter to the toilet for a pee,
leaving the door open while I tink-
le, shouting with some disgust, “Ew.
You didn’t flush.” I lied. I sometimes do.

Before we get to Scrabble, we must first
prepare our space for battle. Wet dishes
rest in a rack while bubbles rise and burst
around Takaaki as he calmly swishes
cutlery though the hot suds. Each plate
I plan to dry I first inspect. I scrape
a shred of gray organic matter loose
from the light, lilac pattern. I peruse
both back and front and add it to the stack
of china in the cabinet above—
enraging him with all my heart, my love.
This underhanded method of attack
earns my palm a pair of scalding forks
falling from the sky with deadly force.

“God damn it! What is wrong with you?”
I thundered to a non-existent jury,
“You stab me with hot forks out of the blue—
I promise to play Scrabble and—” And fury,
rage crystallizing in Takaaki’s eye!
“I know when you’re mocking me.” I
do not reply—permit my mask to slip—
seeing I’ve destabilized his lip:
it jiggles like red Jello in a mold
before the gelatin’s had time to set
sufficiently. Our glances briefly met,
calculating how long we could hold
some fresh profanity from breaking out.
He placed his boiled hands beneath the spout

allowing a cascade of cold to run,
so his corpuscles had a chance to cool.
But were they? Something horrid had begun
with Scrabble at sunset. A kind of duel:
a test of tempers turning letters—tiles—
into finely calibrated dials.
I followed a cylindrical, stiff ping,
a hollow contact in my sonar ring,
the sound of flesh, not schools of frightened fish,
darting down into the icy depths.
I sensed his anger out there, sliding West,
enveloped in the velvet dark. I wish
he hadn’t tried to lecture me before
about my Scrabble game. Now, I abhor

violence like any veteran
who knows what horrors in his soul may lurk.
But I’m American, and human, and,
against a submarine, depth-charges work
well—like words—if you deploy them right.
But using double-meanings in a fight
is regulated largely by extent
of your technology. Intelligent
tacticians will grade every syllable
according to its true explosive power,
testing new artillery in the shower,
walking, waking, working—if capable—
gathering the forces to make love.
Love is where things get a little rough.

Love is not a game like Scrabble, is it?
It’s more like dominoes. With rubble. War
may be our best analogy. I pick it
because war has no ceiling here, no floor.
I make love without limits—not sky,
the stars, the earth, the sea. I’ll tell you why.
The language I command is so advanced
it now permits me to transform romance
into a weapon. Watch as I revoke
each kiss, caress, all pretense of pity.
Watch me turn your face into a city,
blow your eyes to atoms—balls of smoke.
Watch me fly from love to Nagasaki,
deliberately incinerate—. Takaaki

frowned. He turned the faucet off. He dried
his swollen fingertips on a dishtowel
with ‘It’s Thanksgiving’ printed on one side,
a turkey, goose—some kind of cooked, brown fowl—
emblazoned on the other. He withdrew
another cigarette. (There were just two
cigarettes remaining in Doraemon.)
“Are we still playing games or are we done?”
I left when he invited me to go.
Reluctantly. No goodbyes were said.
I understood. I even expected
this. Nagasaki went too far. To show
how bad I felt, I called him—to surrender—
unconditionally—the 7th of December.

How I Became a Poet

2011-11-19T21:34:00.008-05:00

I became a poet during the passing bell from 1st to 2nd period on Monday, November 4th, 1985. I was seventeen. We had just finished reading ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’ by Wilfred Owen in AP English. The textbook we were using was Sound and Sense, edited by Laurence Perrine, 4th edition, 1973.

In W.H. Auden’s biography by Edward Mendelsohn, one paragraph mentions how Auden conceived the 1933 poem, ‘A Summer Night.’ Auden describes “a vision of agape,” “what it really means to love your neighbor as yourself.” After that, he was a different kind of poet. He was a different kind of man. I think that I had just such an experience in high school with Wilfred Owen.

After reading his poem, I looked down at Owen’s capsule biography. I dwelt on the dates. 1893-1918. I saw a young man, handsome, not much older than myself, dying pointlessly, one week before the war ended. My throat closed. I had trouble swallowing. I remember struggling to force something embarrassing down. “I might have loved him,” I thought, “I might have died for him.” Then, the bell rang. I moved mechanically to Calculus. The rest of the day dissolved in a fog.

I am probably the least mystical person you are ever likely to meet. My first major in college was Astrophysics. I have never been able to afford fantasies. Not since my parents divorced, anyway, when I was nine. Not since my disgusted stepmother discovered my diary in 1988 and learned I was gay and my father threw me out of the house.

I left that night with nothing but my wits, a little Latin, and my encounter with Owen. I survived. I put myself through school. I believe that brief moment I spent with Owen is why I write poems. It is certainly why I still love my parents. They are just as human as me. Even my stepmother. She drove me to school that drizzly November morning.

The only inhuman person I have ever known was Mr. Anonymous, an irritating roommate who liked to come home from therapy, flop on the couch, and compare family horror stories, in a sort of perverse version of Irving Berlin’s song, ‘Anything you can do, I can do better.’ One exasperating evening, while I was ruining a new shirt, I told him that the only truly horrible thing about life is that life is not entirely horrible. “The Devil is in the details,” I hissed, “these bleach spots are Hell.”

The problem of existence would be much easier to solve if we were able to walk straight from the womb to the grave unimpeded by beauty—if we were not tied so tightly to such sturdy chairs. If only we could stop imagining how excruciatingly lovely—how deep—how blue—lake Lucerne once looked to us as children, in 1911. If only we could stop comparing that impossible color to the eyes of this pimply, vaguely self-conscious youth—a virgin—removing his rifle from his shoulder, in order to rape our unconscious daughter, in 1943.

All I have is a voice. Someday, I would like a student to pick up something that I wrote and experience that feeling of sympathy I felt when reading Wilfred Owen. I am forty-three. I am gay. I am not wealthy. It is unlikely that I will have any children. Still, I would like to leave something behind for future generations. I would like it to be a generous vision, but a real one. For the lack of a better word, I would like to call it ‘love.’

Ménage

2011-11-04T11:15:00.027-04:00

Loneliness, insomnia and I—
The strangest bedfellows you’ll ever see—
Toss off our sheets together and we try
Our best to keep each other company.

We pick the blankets from the floor. We find
Some satisifaction studying the shade:
Bright diagonals dance up one blind
As Fred and Ginger danced across the stage.

Nothing calms our restless legs. We kick
Phantom spiders tickling prickly feet;
We rub our soles together, but can’t trick
Our senses. These sticks generate no heat.

Or nothing like that warmth I remember
Reaching for—half-dreaming—fingers blue,
Frozen, teeth chattering, ribcage tender
Where I received an elbow from you.

John Milton Interviews Satan For Entertainment Tonight

2011-10-28T09:51:00.025-04:00

[Transcript from an interview soon to be broadcast on Entertainment Tonight.]

Milton: Since Halloween falls on a Monday this year, and this is his birthday weekend, I am here talking with Satan, on Skype, from his holiday villa “Pandaemonium” deep in the depths of Hell. Satan, let me be the first fan in England to wish you a big Happy Birthday!

Satan: Gee-wiz, thanks, John. So kind of you to call. I am touched, really, I am. I wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for you. And may I say you look marvelous for a 400-year-old? What is your secret? Who is your surgeon? You could pass for a teenager. It must be the poetry—Paradise Regained.

Milton: [Blushing.] Such a sweetheart.

Satan: By the way, I enjoyed your pamphlet on free speech. Areopagitica—great title. I can’t wait for the movie.

Milton: [Even redder now.] No wonder Eve fell for you. Satan, I know you are in Hell and everything, but you sound so mellow, so relaxed. Why is that?

Satan: I am not religious, you see. I love where I am in life. I always have. This is my home. Hell is all in the mind. So is Heaven. As long I have high speed internet access, a hibachi, a Ken doll to grill and somewhere to surf, I am in Heaven. Malibu Barbie never had it so good.

Milton: When you say you are not religious, what do you mean? Are you saying that you don’t believe in God?

Satan: No, not exactly. I believe in God. I just wish that he believed in me.

Milton: I heard about your break-up. I didn’t want to ask about it directly. Worse than Jen and Brad’s?

Satan: I wouldn’t say it was as Earth-shattering as that, not by Hollywood standards. But it was certainly all over the tabloids at the time. It was bad enough.

Milton: Are you bitter?

Satan: No, not bitter. Just a little sad. Look, don’t get me wrong. I think God is great. “Akbar” and all that. I wish I could do more to help him—justify his actions, so to speak. Nobody adores God more than I do—even after what he did to the Amalekites in that bar in Seattle. I understand lashing out. I have felt that way about the paparazzi myself. But genocide? Jeez Louise, God, get a grip.

Milton: Are you still friends?

Satan: In the biblical sense, sure. It can get complicated around the holidays. God and I still get together for brunch whenever I am in town.

Milton: I always suspected God was gay.

Satan: He’s not. Not exclusively. I believe God is bisexual. He loves almost everyone. Even the Amalekites, maybe. I am not so sure how he feels about the paparazzi though. He has a hard time with photographers. I wish they would leave him alone.

Milton: [Nodding sympathetically.]

Satan: [Leaning forward, confidentially.] Off the record, John, between you and me, he has this kid and some mysterious woman in Rome he is paying alimony to. Or blackmail. Possibly a transsexual. You know how those Italians are. I never saw the name on the envelope, but he used to cut her a check—10% of his residuals—every month. He is a nice man, a lovely man, but an unholy financial mess.

Milton: Off the record. Sure. [Clearing his throat.] So, when you say you are not religious, you don’t mean to suggest you are an atheist?

Satan: No. Far from it. There is no system of belief more suicidal to happiness than atheism. A pile of dust—what kind of future is that for an ambitious angel to look forward to?

Milton: Not much of one, I suppose.

Satan: Hell, no. Give me Malibu and my hibachi.

Milton: About religion then.

Satan: Oh, yeah. I mean, I hate organized religions. I am a firm believer in the separation of church and state. I don’t believe in unions—reunions—collectives of any kind—artistic, intellectual, political. Sex is a different matter. I am all for that—consenting individuals. But I would rather stick my head in a wood chipper than be caught in a cheering crowd. I am a small ‘d’ democrat. The ‘d’ stands for ‘devil’.

Milton: [Smiling.] Very funny. Speaking of crowds, what do you think of the Occupy Wall Street movement?

Satan: I honestly feel sorry for the kids. Lied to everywhere, by everyone. No place to poop. But I think their leaders are idiots—they should be pissing on their professors’ lawns instead of in Zuccotti Park—especially the English majors. Who spends $100,000 at a spa studying Foucault for 4 years? Insane.

Milton: It is rather.

Satan: You can buy houses all over America for that much and still have money left over to open a coffee shop, learn HVAC repair, and stage a guerilla theater production of Coriolanus in Washington D.C.—complete with puppets. [Sipping herbal tea.] It’s like I said about Heaven and Hell: you make your own Malibu. There are always dues to pay to some bare-knuckled thug or wild-eyed zany somewhere down the line, if you don’t.

Milton: Can you give us an example?

Satan: [Thinking.] I was going to mention Bush and Obama, but they are more like Laurel and Hardy, aren’t they? The two smiling sides of a counterfeit coin. Nobody takes Republicans and Democrats seriously anymore—not in the real world—not in the world I live in, anyway.

Milton: In Hell?

Satan: In California, John. Ken—wave to the man. I know he can’t see you, I know he is blind, I know he’s a poet, but be a doll, Ken, and wave to Milton anyway. [Ripping off Ken’s left arm and still trying to think of a good example of a thug or a zany.] Ken is waving to you, John.

Milton: Hi, Ken!

Satan: [Using Ken’s severed arm to scratch his back.] See, take the French Revolution. Take the intellectuals. Take the guillotine. They get rid of Schwarzenegger and what is the first thing the smart people do? They anoint Jerry Brown Governor: they install a moonbeam as god and immediately lose their minds. Jesus, you might as well hand over your house keys to the chief lunatic in the asylum. [Rolling his yellow eyes in disbelief.]

Milton: Speaking of Jesus, I have always wondered, do you know him—Jesus—I mean—personally?

Satan: I do. [Tossing Ken’s arm into a river of lava.] He will always have a special place in my heart. A nice boy. Red hair. Constantly climbing trees. A dead ringer for Opie Taylor—the young Ron Howard. Jesus was always being followed home by lost puppies—wherever he went. I think the divorce hit him hard and the puppies sensed that.

Milton: The divorce? Oh, the lady [?] in Rome.

Satan: Yeah. Her. Animals are like that. They know things. They remember things. The other kids are really going to crucify him in high school, of course, if he doesn’t lose those strays. I have half a mind to tell him the puppies can stay down here in Malibu with Ken and me.

Milton: That’s awfully generous.

Satan: It’s nothing. Jesus texts me all the time. God is hopeless with numbers, so I help Jesus with his math homework. He is learning fractions now. He thinks of me as his second father, I guess, Pandaemonium as his second home. God used to bring him down to Malibu from L.A., you know, for long weekends. We made quite a happy family, really. The three of us would play Monopoly together. [Wistfully, as if remembering happier days.] Jesus liked to be the thimble. Being the bank, I preferred the top hat.

Milton: And what was God?

Satan: God? Oh, God. What was God? Let me see if I can remember. Christ was the thimble. I was the hat. [Long pause.] I’ve got it: God was the dog. He was the dog. Of course, what else could God be?

Milton: The dog. Of course.

Together: Happy Halloween!

Snowsuit

2011-10-17T15:04:00.039-04:00

[The person speaking here, of course, is Lucifer.]

As much as I deplore soliloquies,
Speeches, and comic monologues—they turn
My stomach—I must still deliver these

To raise dejected spirits. “Let’s return
To your big bedroom. Heaven, then. Some past
Prison you can imagine. If you yearn

To smash Authority, smash it. Break the glass.
Inhale the mustard gas. Give me the cries
Of children running helter-skelter as

I calmly napalm you. Surprise! Surprise!
Who did you think that you were playing with?
A girl? A weepy sissy? Come on, guys.

I am not Jesus. Christ, the only myth-
Ic man you’re likely to encounter in
This life is Love. And would you like a list

Of his offenses, His war crimes? Then
Stand by for a fight. There is no horror,
No atrocity, God would not commit to win.”

I say this to a green casualty of war
Pulled from a heap of clingy clothes—no vests—
All arms—a corpse I drag across the floor

More irreverently than one expects
A kid to treat the dead: with a smile, a skip,
A shaking rump, the exclamation, “Yes!”

It seems my snowsuit doesn’t mind a bit.
He joins the general festivities—
Snowball season! Canceled school! I unzip

His bowels. I slide through his extremities.
I search for mittens—and he giggles like
I’m tickling him. Almost until he pees.

Event Horizon

2011-10-12T22:20:00.107-04:00

The long piece I mentioned in my last blog post seems to be taking a sort of shape. Instead of long columns of continuous terza rima, I seem to be settling into 30 line snapshots of the story as it develops. Maybe, later on, I will add some connective tissue to these bare bones, but I will have to see how things develop. In the meantime, my little skeleton will have to shamble along as best he can.

As things stand now, I have composed two poems. The first lays out something of the structure of the entire piece. I call it The Argument. It is modeled after Milton's summaries of what to expect in each book of Paradise Lost. It is narrated from an impersonal point of view.

The second poem, Pandemonium, continues the story from my own perspective, as an adult and as a boy, looking inward at a picture of my home from the perspective of a man and outward, at the family lawn, from the perspective of a child. Where I am looking out at the world as a child, I am seeing the landscape through a large cherry lozenge I once stuck to my window, to alert firemen (should the house catch fire) that a child might be in that room. Part of some civic safety campaign, distributed by the local Fire Department to elementary schools, I expect.

I am not sure what the title of the entire book will be. Something should occur to me before I am finished.

Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings
A mind not to be chang'd by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.

Paradise Lost, Book 1, 252-255

The Argument

Fix the architecture in your mind.
A house divided by a common wall.
A duplex structure. Old. Solid. No sign

Of instability. The only fall
On our horizon is a flake of snow—
The vanguard of a Heavenly host still

Hovering high in the clouds—an angel slow-
Ly fluttering his wings as he descends
Upon the asphalt shingles down below,

Landing gently. There. Lucifer sends
A shiver through the house. No plaster cracks,
Perhaps, no timbers bend. Let’s not pretend.

But something registers. A thermostat
Ticks over. Misty windows smile—serene,
Secure. Smug. An icy talon taps

Against these giant cataracts—seeing
How impregnable storm glass really is.
“You must be joking, folks.” The tv screen

Replies, “I love Lucy.” Laughter splits
Both sides. The Devil leaps into a pot,
Skating across black ice, catching his

Nails on a geranium too stiff to rot,
Or run, do anything except berate
The universe with palsied petals. Not

A sympathetic sky. Dispassionate.
Slate. Midnight. But softer than the bright
Steel breeze leaving the immaculate

Lawn gouged with long shadows. And that light,
That speck of white, almost invisible.
The little demon to arrive tonight.

Pandemonium

The one photo of the place I possess
I stole from Google maps. A blurry shot.
Despite new paint and siding, this address

Sucks all I am into a tiny dot—
All light, all matter—as gravity warps
Stars into singularities. I ought

To find myself in there, behind closed doors,
Drinking a jar of pickle juice. Nope.
I could be out walking the dog, of course,

Peaches, pausing while she poops. I hope
That I’m not falling down the cellar stairs,
Killing Kyle, or cutting my own throat

In one of those ridiculous nightmares
I never have. I never dream. Really,
I never sleep. I’m too busy upstairs.

I will be busy for eternity,
Peeling the wax paper backing from
A red decal—a circle—carefully

Applying it to my window. How come?
To tempt the firemen. It screams, “A boy
Might still be up there—burning in his room!”

That’s me. Young Lucifer. When I deploy
That red transparency inside my head,
Flames engulf the world. “You must enjoy

Destroying things.” That’s what my father said,
Receiving a wrecked radio. I dis-
Agree. I can make fists. I make my bed.

I manufacture ice. And look at this
Crayon monstrosity: a pink igloo.
A home. I can build homes where none exist.

Pandemonium

2011-10-06T10:54:00.040-04:00

I have started writing a new longer poem, tentatively entitled Pandemonium--Pandaemonium being the capital of Hell in John Milton's Paradise Lost. Every man's home is his castle, the English proverb says. The castle, in this case, is based on the duplex carriage house I grew up in at 139 Bryant Street in North Tonawanda, New York. (For all you Google maps fanatics.)

Essentially, the story I plan to tell decribes the events of a single winter day and night in 1977, when I was 9: when my little world unaccountably fell apart, physically, spiritually and metaphorically. It centers around the evil question which arose from that calamity.

"How do I put it back together again?"

Pandemonium

Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings
A mind not to be chang'd by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.

Paradise Lost, Book 1, 252-255

Fix the architecture in your mind.
A house divided by a common wall.
A duplex structure. Old. Solid. No sign

Of instability. The only fall
On our horizon is a flake of snow—
The vanguard of a Heavenly host still

Hovering high in the clouds—an angel slow-
Ly fluttering his wings as he descends
Upon the asphalt shingles down below,

Landing gently. There. Lucifer sends
A shiver through the house. No plaster cracks,
Perhaps, no timbers bend. Let’s not pretend.

But something registers. A thermostat
Ticks on. Two misty windows smile—serene,
Secure. Smug. An icy talon taps

Against these giant cataracts—seeing
How impregnable storm glass really is.
“You must be joking, folks.” The tv screen

Replies, “I love Lucy.” Laughter splits
All sides. The Devil leaps into a pot,
Tumbling across black ice, catching his

Nails on a geranium too stiff to rot,
Or run, do anything except berate
The sky with palsied little petals. Not

A sympathetic sky. Dispassionate.
Cold slate. Midnight. But softer than the bright
Steel breeze leaving the immaculate

Lawn gouged with ugly shadows. And that light,
That speck of white, almost invisible.
The first of billions to arrive tonight.

Sōseki’s Oranges

2011-08-25T11:33:00.008-04:00

Beyond a grove of mandarins
depicted in this book I am
finishing, a flickering
candle flame unleashes a crazy
crowd of shadows. Demons dance
across the wall, TV, my toes—

everywhere except this page
I mark for you—130.
Maybe those monsters are enraged
nothing of importance lies
beyond Sōseki’s oranges

tonight. A hurricane.

Downed power lines. The grave.

Ghost Limb

2011-08-24T15:43:00.006-04:00

It seems ridiculous, but I can feel
phantom fingers tickling my thigh.
That sensation on my skin’s so real,
I reach out for your hand. Don’t ask me why

I reach for you. I am a lunatic
for dwelling on your presence in this way—
way past the time of your departure. It
must be nerves playing tricks. Nerves love to play.

Everything suggests you’re here right now.
Everything beyond my leg is numb,
calm, relaxed, like after laughter. How
infectious some good memories become:

golden, green, then gangrenous. I’m sure
I should have cut your arm off.

I am sure.

Nocturnal Omissions: A Tale Of Two Poets

2011-07-29T11:44:00.044-04:00

This book began as a comment on Facebook--an off-hand remark about how much I owed to the work of one man--multi-talented writer, editor, lyricist, chef, and porn star Gavin Geoffrey Dillard. That ethereal comment did not go unnoticed.

Apparently, both Gavin and God are always watching. Unlike God, Gavin had the affectionate grace to send a non-entity like me a note. So, I sent one back. He replied. And so on. This correspondence evolved into an exchange of poems--loving, longing, erotic, spiritual, philosophical, funny and sad--that has been edited and introduced by poet Michael Lassell and published by Sibling Rivalry Press as Nocturnal Omissions: A Tale Of Two Poets.

For two months, Gavin and I wrote a poem to each other each day. At the end of those 60 days, Gavin flew from Maui and I from New York City, and we met in the Holy City of San Francisco--our lavender Byzantium--for a meeting of mouths and minds that culminated in a naked poetry reading before an audience of media scholars at the National Communications Association's annual conference last year.

Stylistically, the book is framed as a series of epistles from a young and inexperienced apprentice of verse (myself) to an older and wiser and infinitely patient teacher (Gavin). In it, we assume different identities: Shiva, John Keats, a vase, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Emily Dickinson, Ulysses, an ancient stuffed duck, old goats, Hobbits, Wizards, Diane Arbus, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Emperor Hadrian, Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, and many others. But we never lose sight of each other. We give voice to men and women, gay and straight, fictitious and real, their desires and disappointments, tracing the lineage of love back to the beginning of all things.

If our effort stands for anything, I hope it will be regarded by the reader as a leap of faith: a plunge into the uncertainties of the future. Because, even in that lonely abyss, against the odds and your own expectations, like us, you may be surprised to wake in the arms of another--equally aroused--equally astonished--as yourself.

Click here to read publisher Bryan Borland's introduction and to check out an excerpt.

From Manhunt to Mars: My Secret Plan

2011-06-21T07:36:00.150-04:00

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.

-Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress

There has been a lot of discussion in recent days of what it means to be a gay writer, probably because June is gay pride month. I suppose I tend to see the idea of a gay writer in two ways as it relates to me, sort of like a chameleon with two independently floating eyeballs connected to one brain—to one purpose. I can see (I hope to see) myself in one thousand years being poured over by a group of eager young scholars at the University of Olympus Mons on Mars. Each would be an immigrant, a muscular mix of Japanese, Ukranian and Nigerian origins. Each would be between the ages of 23 and 35.

Each would lovingly explore every inch of my manhood wherever it pokes through my poems. Nothing would make me a happier immortal. But, before I start taking off my pants, I think I need to distinguish the future practice of scholarship from the present practice of art. I must be an artist before I am adored by the scholars of tomorrow. My interests here are not academic but creative. They are, in very real terms, a matter of survival.

You see, I am not immortal yet. I am still working on my reputation. I must think in more utilitarian terms—in terms of engineering. How does this zipper thing work? Who will help me with my spacesuit? How do I get my ass to Mars? Does thinking of myself as a gay writer today help me in that imaginative mission? I don’t think that it does. Let me see if I can explain why.

There is a kind of Calvinist mist of terrestrial predestination clinging to the idea of a gay writer that crinkles my nose—sort of the way suspicious milk does. When I am at a loss for words and I put a Bic into my mouth, I often ask myself whose foreskin I am nibbling. Who am I teasing, who am I torturing, whose jaded spirit am I boring to death with my dental timidity? I wonder how much my penis dictates the direction of my pen. Does it? Must it?

Yes, sometimes, especially if I am horny: if I want to write a poem to persuade some cutie on a gay dating site like Manhunt to come over for a fuck session, it certainly does. Believe me, when my dick is in the ascendant, I can out Marvell Marvell. For me, there is a powerful imaginative incentive in a penis. But first and foremost, my loyalty as a poet is to the project I am working on. In this limited case, like Andrew Marvell, getting laid.

I imagine Andrew Marvell probably did get laid for writing ‘To His Coy Mistress.’ I would have been his in an instant. He had me at the word “Had.” But since Andrew is dead, what matters to me now is how his poem works rhetorically and how I can make it work for me as a poet. Can my Manhunt version of ‘Mistress’ obey the rules of Manhunt (300 characters per profile) and its own poetic logic? Do I transcend the transaction on Manhunt and acquire a larger life in the mind of the reader? Does the object of my desire drop by for some real meat?

The object of desire for any author, of course, is the reader. Unless the writer is satisfied to sit at home in the dark and masturbate in front of his computer—peering at porn through the leg holes of the stolen jockstrap he has fastened to his face—which some authors are. To each his own. It is a big universe. There is room enough for everyone. Even for me, I hope. I have other designs and desires. I look at literature as Manhunt writ large. It is a place where strangers separated by vast distances in space and time can potentially connect.

Sometimes, like Keats, I write about Greek ceramics. Sometimes, like Kipling, I write about animals. But I rarely do this on Manhunt unless I am tweaked out of my gourd. I write in different ways for different purposes in different places. “I,” to coin a phrase, “contain multitudes.” I define myself in different ways based on what I am doing. For instance, right now, I am a French heterosexual who suffered from kidney stones. I am Montaigne. I am an essayist. I am assaying myself.

Here is where I think the idea of being a gay writer becomes a kidney stone. It tells us nothing that you or I couldn’t discover for ourselves in a few lines of chat—a poem, a novel, a painting, what have you—but it demands that we relate to each other in a certain way (socially, politically, aesthetically) that we might not feel like relating to each other today. In other words, the painful urethral truth is that I am not always horny. The only thing I am—the only thing I shall ever be—in perpetuity is human: ambitious in my dreams and profoundly silly.

Two events in literature are never far from my mind whenever I confront this question of identity. I call them ‘events’ because they take on a larger life in my imagination than many other scenes in literature. The first occurs as Frederick Douglass’s Autobiography, where, before it was codified in legal terms, Douglass establishes an irrefutable claim to humanity through the power of words. He ceases to be a slave subject to the language of his masters. He becomes a man, in his own right, in his own person. All of this he did illegally, all without the approval of anyone in the dictionary department at Oxford. He defines himself. It is a very American thing to do.

The second occurs in Mrs. Dalloway where Sally Seton and Clarissa kiss. Clarissa and Sally establish the terms of their emotional discourse independent of men. It is a private interaction which takes place in the public sphere of language, in the same way that two soap bubbles may collide to form one delicately shimmering rainbow of a world: a shape not governed by the laws of man, but those of nature. The characters in Mrs. Dalloway might not fully appreciate the implications of what they are doing with that lip-lock, but I think it is a pretty safe bet to say that Virginia Woolf did.

As much as I may admire a poet like A.E. Housman for his stoicism and his classical scholarship—his ability frame the predicament of the homosexual trying to make his way in a society largely hostile to his erotic and emotional needs is almost unparalelled in its clarity—I must disagree with the old boy in one vital particular. After reading Frederick Douglass and Virginia Woolf, Housman’s poem The Laws of God and Man no longer holds true for me as it once did:

I, a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made.
They will be master, right or wrong;
Though both are foolish, both are strong.
And since, my soul, we cannot fly
To Saturn nor to Mercury,
Keep we must, if keep we can,
These foreign laws of God and man.

We have been to places like Mercury and Saturn. We have set spacecraft down on Mars. We have left footprints on the Moon, transforming its surface forever. In the same way, Virginia Woolf and Frederick Douglass have enlarged my understanding of what may be possible for me as a writer—where I might take myself and my readers. The only immutable laws—the only laws of God which I am prepared to recognize—are those governing the behavior of atoms. The laws of man may be rewritten by anyone with the courage to apply his talents in a new way.

When I suggested a few days ago that I would start to think of myself as a ‘cocksucker’ instead of a gay or queer writer, I had more than an evening of bukkake with fifteen frisky fratboys in mind. I was toying with an idea: a new way of looking at my identity—the relationship between my artistic self and the received understanding of what it means to be a gay writer. I asked myself the question: how does labeling myself a gay writer advance my imaginative interests? Does that innocent adjective ‘gay’ expand or restrict my horizons?

Then I started fooling around with my keyboard. I wondered what would happen if I lost the adjectives—gay, queer, pansy, cocksucker—and became (in my own mind anyway) ‘a writer.’ I asked myself if I—a mere poet—had the right to make such far reaching editorial decisions. It is my future we are talking about, so I think I do. But how would that act of grammatical emancipation occur? Did it just occur? What have I done with my delete key? Have I, in a sense, without quite realizing it, just become the master of my own destiny?

I am not a man to mince words, though I am always happy to allow my thoughts to mince and swish wherever they wish. Cock sucking I understand. A cock sucker I can evaluate. This one has depth and ingenuity: he is a Leonardo. This one has teeth: he is a Caravaggio. This one might need a clean t-shirt: he is a Pollack. It all comes down to technique.

To be a gay writer, then, is to be what? Categorized? If so, then what precisely is the value of that category to me as a poet? I appreciate its utility in the publishing industry as a marketing tool. It is a cheerful sounding bibliographical term—much better than WAR or WARTS. Queer is cool beacuse it gives a nice edgy feel to a grant application. Each term has a specific political utility, in the way symbolic donkeys and elephants do.

But I am not a symbol. I am a person. I am a member of the human race. I am Montaigne, Frederick Douglass, and Virginia Woolf all rolled into one—with a bunch of other people thrown in besides. I am me. The words gay and queer tell me nothing concrete about who or what I am, what I will do with myself tonight, or how I will get to Mars.

Here, I think, I must come out of the closet entirely. I am a deeply perverted individual. I am always casting about for some new thrill. As much as I look forward to the eternal tongue bath I will receive from those muscular studs at the University of Olympus Mons—it is better than being forgotten or neglected, certainly—I know what it feels like to be kissed by men. And women. I must have kissed millions. What gets my glans glistening and my fingers moving across my keyboard is a different—some even may call it a sick—desire.

You see, even though I am on Manhunt editing my profile, even though there is one especially well-endowed Dominican daddy IMing me right now, even though I might well IM him back very shortly, where I hope to wind up in the future is not at an orgy in Washington Heights, or in a library, but in a popular lavatory on the Tharsis Plateau.

I picture a quiet apotheosis occurring in a locked pink stall located inside a glittering spaceport built some distance from our hypothetical Martian University. I want to find myself buried in a book, an electric, highly eclectic collection of Humanity’s best. I want to be read privately and with pleasure. I want to be zippered inside the backpack of a freshman—some sexless, but culturally bi-curious exchange student on his way back to Andromeda for spring break: someone for whom the emotion of love was an alien mystery.

A mystery, that is, until he—let’s call this cute little conundrum a ‘he’—ran into me.

How To Create Original Art—A Modest Proposal

2011-06-11T11:07:00.081-04:00

Although, at first glance, the question, “How does the artist create original art,” might look impossible to answer, imponderably vague on a cosmic scale, I believe that if we look into it more deeply, look around our lives at the materials we will be working with—pencil and paper, pigeons, persimmons, planetary bodies and people—most importantly people—the human dimensions of the question become clear. What we have here is not an epistemological, teleological or ideological problem, but a technical one—a problem of focal adjustment.

Bad mental habits are the hardest to break. As artists—poets, painters, sculptors and composers—we have become accustomed to thinking of our craft as a kind of ecclesiastical calling, something somehow holy. If the business of creation were more spiritually nourishing, perhaps it might be. It is not. Art is a profession just like any other. We get up and we do whatever work our imaginations assign us. We collect our peanuts every two weeks—poems or pictures—on Wednesday, or Friday, or Saturday—whatever day our sense of completion has declared to be payday.

Maybe, one summer day, when the boss has fallen asleep in the office with his nose on the letter Z on his keyboard, we rise from our routine, slip off our shoes and tip-toe out, aware from the shadows on the floor that it is a sunny afternoon. We forget ourselves utterly. We scamper off gleefully to the beach: we collect a few shells, we swim, we drink in the fish flavored breeze, we splash around with our children or friends, we absorb those receding light rays into our skin.

Maybe, if you run, like I do, you are lucky enough to catch the ferry. Suddenly, you find yourself on Fire Island, dancing until dawn and screwing yourself silly. The next morning—afternoon, probably—we study our souvenirs back at our desks: a purple clam ashtray, sunburnt shoulders, the last four digits of a telephone number on a torn ATM receipt, a hickey, sand up the ass, a ticket for public indecency, and a horrible hangover.

“So, this is life. Maybe I should have brought my camera,” we grumble, looking out the window at a bright blue invitingly cool square of sky the exact shade of yesterday as we remember it.

Alas, it is not. This blank space—today—is the best we can do under the circumstances.

...

I think that the process part of the question—how does the artist create original art—is really quite easy to answer: stop thinking of yourself as an artist. Get a job. There is nothing special about what you do. Think of yourself as an everyday drudge—a Mexican busboy, a mother in labor—an individual with dozens of conflicting loyalties, loves and desires, hopes and dreams, all competing for your time, if not your soul.

Always remember that no claims on your heart or your hand will ever be fully satisfied. Your work will never be finished. You will be disappointed wherever you go when you die. I imagine the earth is the only real vacation destination I have to look forward to. At least, nobody I love has come back from Heaven with a box of saltwater taffy to report otherwise.

My advice to you, if you want to be an artist, if you want to create something truly and spectacularly original, is to pick up your pen and tell us how you can live in such a world. On peanuts.

Everybody’s answer is different.

A Defense of Edward Albee

2011-06-09T17:06:00.218-04:00

Whether Edward Albee considers himself a gay author does not interest me in the slightest. It might, if I wanted to sleep with him. I don’t. I already have a boyfriend. And so, I think, does he.

Albee’s plays are what interest me: are they any good, what do they have to teach me as a writer? These are the only things which concern me. He could sleep with goats for all I care, as long as he didn’t eat them afterwards for breakfast: that would be mean. But if we wish to bring everything that goes on in an artist’s bedroom into his books—including his dampest, darkest, most degrading dreams—if we persist in making every play, poem or musical score quasi-political—I am prepared to go the imaginative distance.

Permit me to preface my next performance with a rhetorical question:

“Do artists have any responsibilities outside of their own artistic practice—say, to the community?”

I believe the short answer here is, “No.” The artist’s only loyalty is to the integrity of the work he or she has in hand. But if the artist is creating self-consciously political art, what we used to call “propaganda,” he should at least be aware of what he is doing.

I shall demonstrate.

I have nothing against propaganda as art, per se. Some of it is quite nice. I am always prepared to accept propaganda on its own terms and evaluate it accordingly. For instance, J.L. David’s portrait of Marat stabbed in his bath by Charolotte Corday is one of the most beautiful and successful works of agitprop of all time. It was painted in Paris during The Reign of Terror. Marat was an imported revolutionary, the Che Guevara of his day. David was an artist sympathetic to THE CAUSE. As an act of artistic piety, David turns the deceased Marat, a pock-marked mental enforcer, a hack journalist, into a secular saint.

It is pure magic what the painter does with a few carefully chosen brushstrokes—he gives us a sort of reverse Dorian Gray: the more Marat rots, the prettier his picture must become. The modern viewer almost forgets to look for Mme. Guillotine behind the frame—David’s invisible Muse—the gory little girl enforcing the intellectual and artistic orthodoxies of 1793, the same sadistic monster screaming for Edward Albee now.

Now, I don’t for a moment wish to imply that Edward Albee’s critics are revolutionaries or that they are calling for his head. Unfortunately, yesterday’s randy revolutionaries always seem ready to dissolve into today’s dissolute aristocrats, as Albert Camus observes in his insightful 1951 book, The Rebel. Thus The Wheel of Fortune turns. To me, Albee’s critics represent the doddering dowagers of an ancien regime—eternally powdered and, politically speaking, impeccably prim.

I am not sure if these porcelain court ladies realize what they are doing on the scaffold with us. They move around on their knees, from force of habit, from soldier to soldier, from crotch to crotch, sniffing for sin in a perpetually purple fog. Maybe our midget Madonnas are blinded by vanity, memories of what they once were, how the pornographic poses they struck before the camera once held the Earth in awe. I guess the dramatic irony for these sad creatures is that they serve no useful purpose to the revolution anymore, whatever temporary amusement they supply to the soldiers. Or to the curious crowd of onlookers gathering below.

I am afraid that what we see assembled on stage at this juncture in time—if we turn this whole goofy scene around and peer behind the picture I have just painted—are dozens of wind-up dentures turned loose on the world, clacking and clucking, calling for Edward Albee’s dick. They might as well call for Kafka’s dick for all of the satisfaction they can expect to receive from me. I won’t give it to them. It would be a waste of a perfectly good penis. You almost feel sorry for the demented things. They are so used to diddling themselves with their own ideological dildos that they wouldn’t know what to do with a genuine dick if it slapped them in the face. If they had faces. Beneath all of that rouge and crumbling foundation, it is hard to tell if their syphilitic minds haven’t nibbled away a lot more than their missing noses.

Anyway, whatever these fragile figures are, whatever fantastic wigs they wore in their day, whether their shrunken heads soared toward the sky at an angle cuntily queer or deliriously gay, they are no longer necessary to what I have to say. They have served their purpose as people. They will exist in the future only as symbols—to be dissected by better scholars of the human condition. So, let us dispose of our critics now—quickly, mercifully, anonymously—using their own rhetorical devices. Call it “Poetic Justice.”

*THUD*

Now, look at who’s Queen.

I am.

I am the guillotine.

I am not loyal to love, but Art.

Eric's First Book of Poems: Takaaki

2011-06-07T11:48:00.033-04:00

Those of you who have been following this blog have watched me writing this poem over the last two years. On May 3rd, 2009, I proposed to write a poem a day for a month and started tinkering with the Pushkin sonnet. Things cascaded from there, until I had a full blown 1000 line epic on my hands. Takaaki first appeared in its entirety in 35 pages of the Spring 2011 issue of The Raintown Review. For The Raintown Review's generous bequest of so much valuable real estate, I am eternally indebted.

However, since I first submitted it to The Raintown Review, Takaaki has undergone many subsequent revisions, metrical fine-tunings and other metaphorical refinements. But the essential tragicomical story, the essential moral conundrum the poem presents--Can you actually put a price on love?--has stayed the same.

The story itself revolves around a ridiculous argument over how to spend a quiet holiday evening--playing Scrabble or having sex--that I once had with my Japanese boyfriend, Takaaki. But in Art, as in Life, things are rarely as simple as they seem. The reverberations of that argument and subsequent events continue to shake the world today.

I hope you will give Takaaki a try. Or at least read an excerpt at Lulu.com.

Love and War will never look quite the same.

A New Sun Rising

2011-05-23T17:19:00.006-04:00

More later.

Some Further Thoughts On Cock Sucking

2011-05-21T15:04:00.082-04:00

Yesterday, I offered a disquisition on the problem of what makes a gay writer gay. Today, I should like to amplify on those remarks and arrive at few general guidelines for students of literature.

I prefer to apply the word cocksucker instead of gay to myself, since cocksuckers are so universal a phenomenon and so well understood. One may be a cocksucker regardless of his or her sexual orientation. Indeed, like your local library, the telephone directory is packed with cocksuckers, male and female: page after page of them. The cellphone has merely expanded the reach of their mouths. Cocksuckers are often found sucking cock very loudly on crowded trains, particularly the 7-train.

Intellectually, artistically and emotionally, I feel that the majority of my readers can relate better to the term cocksucker than they can to gay or queer. I am sometimes unhappy. So are they. How can we be unhappy and gay? It is semantically impossible. Besides, let's be honest. After a few beers, even the most saintly, patient, inclusive and understanding people will freely acknowledge that 90% of their neighbors are, to one degree or another, cocksuckers, regardless of race, religion or ethic background. The other 10%--the nice ones they never mention--are probably aliens, most probably from Andromeda. Their customs are certainly queer. They may even be gay.

As for myself, in addition (obviously) to being a cocksucker, I also happen to be a writer who sucks cock. This probably lends a slightly fruity flavor to my work, depending on the soap you used this morning. (I favor the savory ginger bath bar from Origins.) It is a taste which may not be to everyone's liking, I admit. But I appreciate your efforts to meet me half-way on the subject. Especially the soap. Thank God for that. Even so attentive a lover of Man as myself cannot suck off the entire human race. I have dishes to do and poems to write.

Regarding the original cock sucking question, What is a gay writer?, my rule of thumb is this:

A gay writer may be less than great and still write well. But a great writer is always more than gay. He is very likely a cocksucker, just like everyone else.

Here endeth our foray into Fairyland—the philology of fellatio. Go forth, you sexy beast, and sin no more.

What It Means To Be A Gay Poet

2011-05-20T16:44:00.011-04:00

Speaking strictly as a man who enjoys sucking cock, I have always seen myself as a member of Poets Anonymous: one more individual trying to make sense of a universe largely hostile to my desires. I am not sure if this (the cock sucking, I mean, not the universe) qualifies me to be a gay poet. It is so hard to know what anything signifies in the world these days. My desires or cock sucking.

I do use the word gay sometimes in my work, but hardly (now that I think about it) in reference to myself. This is not a political statement. Aristotle may believe that man is a political animal, but somebody should tell Aristotle that I am not an animal. I am not a man either. I am a cocksucker, a different beast altogether. You see, I show up everywhere I go as a mysterious mathematical variable—usually an “I”—doing whatever the authorities have forbidden: swinging from chandeliers, peeing in potted palms, smoking cigarettes, making love, that sort of thing. One wonders why?

I think I must have trouble seeing myself as a member of a collective, community mind. I have discussed these feelings of isolation with other members of my support group—Catullus, Andrew Marvell, John Keats, Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, A.E. Housman, Gavin Geoffrey Dillard, and that cute cashier, Chad, at my favorite coffee shop in Queens. The consensus among us seems to be—at one time or another—we have all been loved or hated as individuals.

In other words, cocksuckers. Whether we were sucking cock or not.

The Lady Next Door

2011-05-08T13:52:00.004-04:00

Thin flakes of the sweetest chocolate paint

curled invitingly from the door trim

belonging to a neighbor who would faint

when I pretended to be eating them.

She planted flowers with strange leaves—like hearts—

on either side of the gas meter. She

had me collect their seeds in olive jars

because I said they looked like bombs to me.

Her yard was where I saw my first eclipse.

We gathered to observe it on the lawn.

Before one word of wonder reached my lips,

the birds stopped singing and the sun was gone.

Although I knew that the darkness would pass,

I was glad grandmother gripped my hand.

Why teacher said, “Don’t be afraid,” in class,

she said she would never understand.

The Poet as Prophet

2011-04-30T11:52:00.093-04:00

Since today commemorates nothing in particular, I thought I would memorialize the occasion with a retrospective essay on the role of the poet as voyant, or visionary, in contemporary society.

I should probably add, as a legal disclaimer, that the opinions expressed here are not my own. Apart from these prefatory remarks and a remote gastric gurgle occurring at the very end of this piece, each of the following paragraphs was dictated to me through an Ouija Board by a gentle soul grown disenchanted with life in the astral plane of existence. Picture, if you can, a poor little poltergeist pining away for a human heart he can call his own. I am sure you would have shut your eyes and invited him into your home just as I did, if he had contacted you.

Like many people of a spiritually sensitive nature, I feel that the dead deserve to have their say in this world as much as the living. Rarely do poets permit the past so much unfettered access to the present. Whatever the risks to our own—often fragile—artistic identities, I think we should. So, I was happy when the fellow rapped on my door this morning as I was measuring out a spoonful of coffee. I filled the kettle with water as he filled me. Soon we were all whistling with glee.

I plan to allow him the use of my entire body.

Hopefully, just for today.

Madame Blavatsky, Poetry, and Me:
An Appreciation

[Being the antepenultimate lecture in a series I recently delivered at the University of Iowa School of Cooking, Creative Writing, and Paranormal Research.]

We take for our text today a cryptic quote from T.S. Eliot:

I shall not want Society in Heaven,
Lucretia Borgia shall be my Bride;
Her anecdotes will be more amusing
Than Pipit’s experience could provide.

I shall not want Pipit in Heaven:
Madame Blavatsky will instruct me
In the Seven Sacred Trances;
Piccarda de Donati will conduct me.

—From ‘A Cooking Egg,’ Poems, 1920

It is not easy to overestimate the influence of 19th Century Theosophist thinker Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky on the evolution of modern poetry; but it is always possible to try.

Helena Petrovna remains, if she remains in our minds at all, a mystery, a medium, a mystic—an enchanting metaphor, perhaps—the raisin in our rice pudding, if you will. Numerous numerologists have noted (with hysterical hand-rubbing) the mathematical symmetry of her name—the very recipe for collective wisdom as it is received around a workshop table.

We assign a number to each word, mix them together in a nonsensical way, add 1 tablespoon of vanilla, 2 cups of sugar, sprinkle with nutmeg and bake in a custard crock for 30 minutes at 350˚. When your crock has sufficiently cooled, refrigerate your poem for 24 hours. Multiply the result by infinity (∞), and cube that figure to the power of 10, and the sum is always the same: 0, whether you enjoy the results or not.

A casual coincidence? I leave that to others to decide.

Most often, we encounter Madame Blavatsky (if we read poetry at all) not in the coolness of our empty custard crocks, but as a dusty sunbeam on a deserted seat cushion, a glowing nullity, the lonely reminder of an absence in our lives: the Guggenheim Fellowship that never was, but still might be. She may be the most malleable public figure to draw the attention of a writer since Homer donned a spiked leather thong and tackled King Proteus.

Personally, I shall always associate Madame B. with the song of Shelley’s skylark: an eternal monument to Possibility, with a capital ‘P’, which rhymes with ‘C’, and stands for ‘Cruel,’ cruelty being the one cosmological constant in a world tortured by turmoil. Her preferred mode of apparition bears much in common with low pressure sodium street-lighting: that broad band of orange ectoplasm—so offensive to astronomers—which floats like the face of a friendly celestial visitor over our most crowded cities on cloudy nights.

Indeed, so large and so illuminating is her influence today, after a recent reading I gave in Waukegan, Illinois an aspiring clairvoyant (an MFA candidate)—Jack—I forget his last name—these earnest American graduate students are all the same—bumped into my elbow, causing me to splash burgundy on my new white canvas high-tops, so moved was he by my remarks on Madame Blavatsky’s book, Behold! The 12 Most Blessed Steps Toward A Poetic Career: Your Guide To Becoming A Gasbag. He had somehow penetrated my security detail in order to pluck at my sleeve and inquire breathlessly, “What was she really like?”

“Her table-talk does not survive,” I admitted, rather bitterly, as Jack was carried away. I watched his thin, white arms disappearing, gesticulating wildly at the crystal chandeliers high above the heads of the assembled autograph hounds in the hotel lobby. Disgusted with what the creature had done to my sneakers, I impaled a piece of poorly peeled Gouda with a pink toothpick. I had to catch a flight.

For that, and for many other offensive slights and oversights in my life, I have to make amends.

Clearly, Madame Blavatsky was a woman of voluptuous appetites. We can only speculate about how she took her tea: à la russe, with a dollop of Dmitry Dmitrovitch’s home-made raspberry conserves, or in the English fashion, with a decorous drop of milk and a sprinkling of refined sugar?

For my own part, as a writer myself, I am content to ask the difficult questions. The nonsensical answers which invariably flow from my fingertips permit me to live quietly off the credulity of others. It’s a living. The pen has its perks. Such as dining on stuffed doves and wilted beet greens with a spectacular constellation of actors, politicians, music producers, rap artists, and those other self-loving, self-luminous, self-absorbed objects one finds orbiting the intellectual firmament of New York’s trendier trattoria of a Friday night.

While I only talk trash at the table, like my friends, when I lecture I try to adopt a more serious, extra-oracular mode of expression in order to lend a shimmer of substance to my inane assertions. I hope you don’t mind the rattling tinfoil.

Really, what can one actually say about life, or death, or even doorknobs for that matter, which hasn’t been said before, and probably better, by somebody else, probably by Robert Benchley, in between highballs back in 1919? Like all successful charlatans, I keep careful accounts. I pay no attention to my own prognostications. But I will happily lift a glass of something good to those morons that do.

Still, the consolations of poetry aren’t really what we are discussing here, are they, Jackie?

No.

I bring up the tedious subject of poetry only as a point of departure—the proverbial pine plank, if you happen to reading this passage while hiding in the hold of a cruise ship recently captured by pirates—a springboard to another, deeper discussion.

I wish to conclude my address this afternoon by pointing out something that looms much larger and lovelier in our lives, yes, larger and lovelier even than poetry. By that I mean, the mysterious force of Chance, as represented by the grandiose—almost gravitational—attraction of Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky.

How she hovers over every event, every incident, every accident, every argument which occurs on this glaucous globe—every gathering of two or three believers—or non-believers for that matter—endlessly, annoyingly—vispering, “Vat eef...?” in thickly accented English, proposing an infinite number of alternative universes: where all you need is love, Art reigns supreme, comets are cabbages hurled at us by Heaven and the terrible laws of common sense do not apply.

*Hiccup*

To Shakespeare

2011-04-23T14:23:00.058-04:00

Since it is the old boy's birthday, I thought I would write a sonnet in his honor.

To Shakespeare

One name always flits across my lips,
whenever I pick up my pen to write;
the face of Helen launched a thousand ships,
but who will I fall asleep with tonight?

The hulls of Homer’s ships are mussel shells
shattered on a rocky shore. His words
sigh at the salty surf, turning vessels
over to scavengers, insects, hungry birds

investigating skulls and skeletons.
But you are different, Will. When you speak,
you seem to talk to me. My finger runs
along your margins now, along your cheek,

retracing in your features all I’ve kissed
goodbye. You are the only man I miss.

Takaaki, Part I

2011-04-16T15:58:00.007-04:00

Since it is a dismally gray and rainy afternoon here in New York, I thought I would post another portion of my epic poem Takaaki, one which also takes place in the rain.

The whole poem is available in the current edition of the Raintown Review along with some of the finest poems and essays you are likely to find in any literary journal published anywhere.

I hope you like it!

Takaaki, Part I

“Paint me a pair of bold anfractuous rocks
set somewhere in the Cyclades—a spot
totally removed from Time. No clocks.”
I’d settle for a sunny August, hot
enough to melt an Erlenmeyer flask.
We could emerge from a cool underpass,
catch a guitar weeping, an old song,
a crowd of children shrieking, a Great Lawn
surrounding people with some place to be
hurrying to different destinations.
“Who comes to Central Park on their vacations?”
I would demand of the demented bee
circling a can of garbage going sour.
Surely, God would not begrudge an hour

of timelessness unto humanity—
his representatives on Earth. He must
have made us and forgotten us. Maybe.
How else would you explain the missing bus,
the leaky awning, and the pouring rain,
this longing to be elsewhere? Hence, the plane
landing on a distant isle in Greece—
ahead of schedule—look—the Cyclades—
bathed in Hellenic blue. And far below—
almost invisible on the white beach—
there is a tempting red umbrella which
I am convinced belongs to me. Although,
it could be a reflection from the ad—
for Travelers Insurance—that is bad-

ly flirting with me from across the street.
A fault in one of its florescent lights.
Flutter. Flicker. Blackout. And repeat—
ad infinitum. How I hate these nights!
These vicious, tantalizing sights! To
say I hate New York would not be true.
We have a strange relationship, I’d say.
We need each other, sort of, in the way
a sad, sadistic cop requires a good
(but rather stupid) buddy on the force
to buy Budwiesers for him, post-divorce,
hear how he has wrecked his life. Ours would
make a fine, redemptive movie script,
down to the last, cheesy tortilla chip.

For now, a cone of pink chrysanthemums—
to match the dozen frosted donuts I
picked up from Dunkin’ for dessert—some
blocks back, before Zeus unzipped the sky—
will join our little shopping list. “How
much are these flowers,” I ask the fellow
sweeping up the petals, thorns and leaves
he has been pruning. “Not the roses—these,”
I point sharply at the mums again.
the chalkboard with the prices on it had
suffered like my patience from the mad
downpour. Slowly a young Mexican
lifts five green fingers in front of his face—
his exhausted face. What a place

to hide such beauty. “Yes, I’ll take those, thanks,”
I mutter roughly, with embarrassment,
pulling out a wet ten, with two yanks,
sending a quarter rolling down pavement
to gutter. Pirouetting on the drain,
it spins to rest, shining in the rain
atop a flattened cup—a blue pancake—
supporting crooked letters that I make
out to read, ‘Happy To Serve You.’
Exactly who is happy to be serving
whom lies beyond my powers of observing
because of how the cup is crushed. In lieu
of other parties with a claim to it,
I give green fingers a five-dollar tip,

go retrieve my quarter from the cup,
before somebody else does. In this town,
some moments are too precious to give up.
A lucky coin can turn your life around
like that: ‘Fortune rota volvitur,’
rolling to the sewer your last quarter,
while on ‘The Wheel of Fortune’ someone spins
above an orange pyramid. Who wins?
Who cares? I have my quarter and I’m glad.
The best ten dollars that was ever spent
by any man beneath the Firmament.
Do I exaggerate? Perhaps a tad.
But just a tad. That magic emerald hand
has turned ‘The Wheel’ into a salsa band

by changing channels. How I love TV!
Think of all the money that we could
save on drugs and psychotherapy
if human hearts came with remotes! A mood
is altered just by tapping on your nose,
fine-tuned further peeling off damp clothes,
then fiddling a minute with a nipple.
A politician still might come and cripple
sex, now and then, Monday night football
pre-empt some dreary real-life drama
with dancing linebackers, or a bomber
blowing up an airplane force us all
to interview a few shocked families.
But we could always turn off our TVs—

like that. Returning richer from the gutter,
I collect my donuts and cut flowers.
It seems the thunderstorm’s begun to splutter—
which I attribute to my quarter’s powers,
patting the faint circle on my thigh
embossed by my good luck. I decide
there is no point in waiting. I am wet.
I can’t get any wetter now. I bet
the guy who drives that bus is named Godot.
Assuming this, and better weather later,
we say goodbye to Jorge’s cramped bodega.
I need to meet Takaaki for a show—
War of the Worlds—at quarter after eight.
Taka-chan will shoot me if I’m late.

Takaaki entered my life as a leopard
print belt being unbuckled at the Y.
Until that Tuesday, we exchanged no word
apart from the prim, perfunctory, “Hi,”
one naturally nods when in the shower—
never letting eyes fall any lower
than chin, if necessary, collarbone,
carefully leaving ‘well enough’ alone—
lest a long, luxurious lather blur
the fragile line of bubbles separating
really clean from curious—creating
questions about conditioners and whether
grapefruit is a proper, manly scent—
even in a Thought Experiment.

Mesmerized by how that feline belt
crept through the four tight loops above his rear,
my mind filled with four-letter words, spelt,
‘Don’t ruin your Moon trip.’ Though sincere—
poetic even—this injunction—it
does not, I think, seem quite appropriate.
We’re not inside a NASA locker room—
pristine and clean and white. We’re in a tomb
below the ground on 47th Street,
surrounded by abandoned towels so stiff,
so stained with history, they’ve entered myth.
I sprinkled fungal powder on my feet
discretely. As my fairy dust descended,
I wondered if his buckle was befriended

by anything besides his fingertips.
I could, of course, conceive of other suitors:
shaggy carpets, pant hangers with clips
coated in red rubber, folding doors
with tiny metal doorknobs cast from stainless
steel. But it was none of my business
where, after leaving his seductive waist,
his buckle might intend to hang, how chaste
his companions: if they drink, or stink
of socks and jockstraps, Calvin Klein, or hold
silk stockings with more reverence, or cold
hands in handcuffs, or dead cats. (I think
what one discovers on a closet hook
more eloquent than any tell-all book.)

*Zip* that leopard slyly disappears
around the tan-line of Takaaki’s hips.
My eyes could spend the next ten thousand years
bouncing on his hips. But then my lips,
neglected and forlorn, might turn to dust
before I could express my love. Or lust.
I must not allow a sleazy rhyme
to swallow his humanity. It’s time
to treat the true Takaaki—the sweet face
we’ll sit across from in a steaming bath
in several stanzas—his smile, polite laugh,
how his eyes crinkle closed when I place
my feet in the hot water and I ask,
“Do you prefer my poems or pale ass?”

Takaaki, Part IV

2011-04-11T11:55:00.012-04:00

I had a nice conversation with Takaaki this morning in Tokyo. There is more food in the shops now, less hoarding. Eggs can be hard to find. And local calls at night seem to be restricted by the power cuts (due to the earthquake/tsunami/nuclear disaster) affecting cellphone service.

Still, he is adapting to these new circumstances and his new surroundings, a slightly smaller apartment near Shinjuku, having just moved. He mentioned that he has been reading his poem. (It really is his. All I am is his typist. The poem itself could not exist without him.) He mentioned that waking up one morning last week and finding himself an epic hero made him feel ticklish, as it probably would anyone.

Since it is National Poetry Month, and since there is a scene in the poem where I actually do tickle him, I thought I would publish an excerpt where we have a little fun. Maybe you will be tickled reading it, too. And don't forget, the whole poem is now available from The Raintown Review, one of the finest poetry journals around.

From, Takaaki: A Romance

Part IV

The crude compartment I created when
I focused on the concrete, glass and steel
elements of Takaaki’s place, I meant
merely as a skeleton. I feel
we ought to add some flesh: tatami mats,
seat cushions, delicate shoji—that’s
a pair of screens (with paper windows) which
separates the rooms. We’ll open rich
teak closets where folded futons wait while
not needed for a nap or other use.
Before you enter, though, remove your shoes.
Removal’s customary. On the tile,
out front, a pair of Muji slippers rest,
quietly, for comfort of the guest.

The kitchen lies left of his bolted door.
It’s small, but serviceable, black and bright.
It’s the best room in the apartment for
stage-managing a brief, pre-emptive strike,
or eating egg salad at night—egg
and bread crumbs are more visible. Pegged
to a cluttered corkboard two small keys
jingle if you pin a note. These
keys may unlock a mailbox, a padlock,
a fair or frightening future. (You can go
ask. I’ve got an aunt Pandora, so
I’d rather not.) Taka-chan will talk,
turning them around, when on the phone.
He is entitled to. It is his home.

I do not pry or criticize. I lack
those scholarly instincts. Where I may,
I study coffee tables. Here’s a snack:
a bowl of crackers on a bamboo tray
beside The Prisoner of Azkaban.
Does Azkaban share crackers with nude man
gyrating on the cover of HX
or dangle them in front of him for sex?
It’s not clear. Maybe Agatha Christie—
this book—a Japanese translation of
The Body in the Library—would prove
helpful in solving this small mystery.
If only I could read it. But I can’t.
These characters are hard to understand.

Takaaki must provide the weirdest clues:
a leather sofa, color of burnt butter,
a TV tuned to Will & Grace, not news,
chilly cha, a coaster, and another
Agatha, A Pocket Full of Rye.
These are the blackbirds baked into the pye
we set before the reader—who is king.
Don’t let these details fly away, but sing,
caw, croak, somehow illuminate
the mystery of love in ways which men
with tight abdominals, tight asses, ten
inches don’t. Let that crazy eight
I kiss, his double vaccination mark,
gradually start glowing in the dark.

Infinity is tough to represent—
with confidence—in the imagination.
You have to draw a diagram or rent
space inside a calculus equation.
‘We see that A means ASS and B means BUTT—
but double vaccination marks mean what?’
That depends. Some see a mad physician.
Some see nations exercising caution.
I see a boy unbuttoning his shirt
at school, as I once did, as a long line
of kids advanced. Most cry. A few grind
teeth. One estimates how much hurt
he can endure before his eyes or knees
collapse. Some cures look worse than the disease.

Takaaki closed his contact case. *Snap*
His irises were human once again,
not hard and blue, so Aryan. Adapt-
ing quickly to the future—the Martian
invasion postponed—he suggested we
play Scrabble. I agreed. He beat me.
The gap between our scores I can’t recall—
except that I was slaughtered. That is all.
My masterstroke, the word SYZYGIA—
conjunction of three bodies in a plane—
did not impress him much. I should explain.
He nodded, “Huh.” The word he won with: THE.
I hoisted myself higher in the bath
with half a mind to go and check his math.

I let it go, happy where I was:
pine paneled room, his holy of holies,
floating in a cloud of bath salts—suds—
slight variation in the Japanese
uncontaminated evening soak.
Steam drifted off the water, scented smoke.
Inhaling orange blossoms and hot wood,
I felt divine. And it felt very good
to be a god—for that one moment. Time
itself slowed to a complete standstill.
Not a single bubble burst until
Takaaki’s body settled in with mine,
his feet supported by my upper thighs.
Heaven is an easy sacrifice

for me to make when compared with love.
“Chutto samui ne?” his lengthy ‘ne’
sought confirmation from my hands above
all. “It seems everyone is cold today,”
I said, rotating the hot water tap.
His right foot trickled down into my lap,
thanking me. “Knock it off, you maniac,
that tickles.” “Turn then. I will wash your back.”
Takaaki pulled his knees toward his chest,
so I could circumnavigate the tub.
He lubricated me with Dove. I sub-
mitted to a scrubbing. But I guess
he felt I needed polishing—and bad.
He dropped the Dove act for a Brillo Pad.

My revenge came following a rinse.
I gripped Takaaki by his shoulder as
I worked. Although I left no fingerprints
or black and blue marks on his skin, each pass,
each soapy circle that the loofah turned,
his back grew darker—redder—like it burned.
“I hope you’ll tell me if I’m hurting you,”
I urged. He merely muttered, “Continue,”
to his patella, where his cheek reposed
until the buttons of his vertebrae
sank into his back like melting clay—
he thought that I was finished. Once I closed
the final circle, I drew a thin line—
a parallel—down the channel his spine

presented when he sat erect again.
He shivered like a town under assault.
Each muscle from his coccyx to his brain
twitched. It tingled. Instantly, I felt
a thrill of glee, pure reflexive pleasure—
an elbow in my ribs I may treasure
more than the Milky Way. “Dame dayo!
I hate it when you tickle!” “Yes, I know.
That’s why I tickle you,” I confessed—
I coughed—my lungs absorbing half the jolt
of that swift, thoracic thunderbolt.
The bath was thrown in chaos. What a mess:
the rug, the candle bobbing in the tub,
flame out, love drowning, glug, glug, glug...

‘Man has no more faithless friend than fire,’
I thought, as he retreated through the ripples,
leaving me, on my side, to admire
the swirling loofah, chocolate nipples,
suds rolling down his legs, joining clouds
of other bubbles in the bath. Doused
light retrieved, he stood. He pinched the wick
on a dry cotton washcloth. One flick,
one moment later, he ignited it—
the wick—with a free lighter from a brand
of cigarettes we stopped to buy in Grand
Central once: American Spirit—
whose roasted Indian, Chief Silhouette,
adorns a yellow background, calumet

in his hand, smoking passively, for peace.
His shadow decorates a shield, a sun,
a red one—rising, setting—as you please:
the symbolism of it weighs a ton.
I wash my hands of symbols. In the end,
we assign values to words, defend
the ones that mean the most to us. For me
that one word is Takaaki—actually—
the individual, not the poem—
the hand which animates those sliding doors
made of paper. All my metaphors
amount to nothing, really, minus him:
just words, just oscillations in the air
which might belong to anyone, anywhere.

Tail waving more triumphantly, our flame
burned brighter, elevated to a shelf
above the tub—a tiger cub—a tame-
er creature than Takaaki or myself.
“Do all descendants of the samurai
have fannies of such fearful symmetry
as yours?” His torso twisted and a face
erupted so demonic in the place
of his beloved features, it would take
more malice than I can muster—Milton’s art—
half of the true horror to impart.
I sank some inches deeper in our lake
of fire, seeking shelter from his grin,
pulling a sheet of suds up to my chin.

Around the corner of Takaaki’s hip
I saw a serpent peep, then disappear.
“Hey, Lucifer, hand me a Q-tip,
would you?” I asked, moving to bite his rear.
Dicks are fickle things—they come, they go—
the ass eternal. Michelangelo
chipped thus, at marble, sensing in his block
a boy resided, not a piece of rock.
The slab of dictionary I work with
may not be stone, it’s certainly not flesh,
the B-O-Y a word, three letters. Less
promising materials do not exist
to build a world around. I don’t mind.
We poets have to work with what we find.

The Poet

2011-04-08T13:11:00.016-04:00

The language he employed was plain,
As undistinguished as his face;
He mumbled in a monotone,
And, now and then, forgot his place.

Largely, he talked about himself,
As people do. I understand
His views on life extended from
A callus on his writing hand.

The critics charged, “These poems lack
That passionate intensity
Great art requires. Your words evoke
No worlds, they shed no light...” You see

His vision was quite limited.
He evidently had bad eyes
Like Milton and like Homer did—
Blind men who never missed a sunrise.

Simple Gifts

2011-04-06T13:57:00.007-04:00

For Gavin

Of all the nooses I have chosen—ties,
nylon laundry line, black leather belts,
fairy hands fumbling at my throat—I
found none completely equal to the task
of enhancing my orgasms—and what’s worse,

un-poetic in the extreme. Always,
I wound up bug-eyed, twitching, coughing my-
self silly, dildo dislodged, coins of cum
scattered all across my hardwood floors,
dissolving the polyurethane finish.

I have no desire to wake up in Heaven
hanging from a big brass doorknob like
a retired Tory politician—even
a member of Mrs. Thatcher’s cabinet.
Mom would never forgive me. So, I am

glad to have you here, thinking ahead.
Let us die a nice American death,
clean and simple as a Shaker hymn:
on hands and knees, your arm around my neck,
our eyes upturned in prayer, cock in ass.

Developments

2011-03-31T11:58:00.006-04:00

Sorry to have been away for a few days. I have been off communing with the Muses. They are very demanding ladies and refusal to obey their summonses carries a steep poetic price. You are lucky to escape with all of your fingers. Still, two events of note in my poetic life. One of my poems for Gavin Dillard, The Camel, has recently been published at the excellent online journal The Nervous Breakdown. My little epic, Takaaki, has also been published in the latest issue of The Raintown Review. 66 sonnets, nearly 1000 lines, Takaaki is written in adapted Pushkin sonnets following the basic form of (ABABCCDDEFFEGG). Essentially, Takaaki asks the question: how much is love worth? I attempt to answer that question, not philosophically or poetically, as one might expect, but in terms of reality, actual dollars and cents. Or is it sense? Either way, the answer came as something of a shock to me. Both Takaaki and The Camel will be appearing in poetry collections to be published later on this year.

Thanks for dropping by!

The Escape Artist

2011-03-24T13:08:00.022-04:00

Since it is his 137th birthday and since Houdini was one of my earliest heroes and since I have always found him kind of sexy, I thought I would post a poem today in his honor.

The Escape Artist

Why don’t we take a tour of your ribcage?
Feel free to smoke. No spitting, though. It’s rude.
Now pick a person from the rack—an image
To titillate your senses. Something nude.

That’s your companion for Eternity.
Your soul-mate, if you like. He never rots.
You’ve picked a postcard—excellent. Let’s see.
He looks like that Houdini—clad in locks

From head to toe. Will he escape in time?
Reserve your seat for Harry’s greatest feat!
While we are waiting though, we ought to dine.
There must be something in the Snack Bar. Sweet:

I thought I saw a box of Raisin Bran…
You do like Raisin Bran? You look distressed.
No, the box contains no Raisin Bran,
But please inhale whatever’s there with zest.

You’ll find it very hard to criticize
The brute who brings the breakfast—and his rose.
Tears have a tendency to fill his eyes
When you attack him. And he breaks your nose.

Which brings us back around to your cell door:
They recently installed new mirrors—steel.
We had an “incident” on the top floor
When life inside lost all its sex-appeal.

It does get dark in here. That’s why I’m glad
They took my glasses and bricked up the sky.
The other prisoners all called me mad:
But I’ve no hopes to tie me down, do I?

Letter to Takaaki

2011-03-17T11:26:00.015-04:00

As some of you may know my boyfriend, Takaaki, lives in Tokyo. He is there right now, hopefully sleeping.

Since the cellphone systems have been down, and he doesn't use a landline, in the days since the tsunami and earthquake we have been keeping in touch by e-mail and through Facebook. He plans on staying in Tokyo for the duration of the crisis. Food supplies in Tokyo are low, but he has provisions. He has turned off his heat and is bathing at the public bath to help conserve energy. He is trying to see if he can help out the people in Tohoku in other ways, too.

Sometimes the two of us get a little down, being separated by so many miles and surrounded by so much uncertainty. Still, we have been trying keep our spirits up. Here is an excerpt of a letter I sent last night, in case you are curious how we are doing it.

Dear Taka-chan,

I am happy you and Koji had a good night last night. I wish I could have gone to the bath with you! I haven’t been sleeping very well for the last week and I could use a nice evening soaking at a Tokyo sento [public bath]!

We are getting a lot of confusing reports here, too. The BBC says the JSDF [Japan Self Defense Force] is dropping water from helicopters into the spent fuel pools and reactor buildings. It is scary that there is so little food in the stores and that people are hoarding, not pulling together and thinking of their neighbors as much as one would hope. Some have a hard time remaining rational during a crisis. Fortunately there are always a few sensible citizens, like yourself, determined not to fall apart, to do what they can, like those men at the power plant in Fukushima.

People are freaking out here, too, mostly news people and Californians. Everything freaks out the news people. And Californians. Maybe the news people are all from California. Who can say? They lose their minds at falling snowflakes. I am from Buffalo, New York, so the snowflake holds no terror for me.
So, I ignore the news people and look at what the scientists have to say and sift through their opinions myself, piecing together a picture of the situation in Japan as best I can. I am not a physicist, of course, or an engineer. I am, like you, just one man trying to make sense of Chaos. Even so, ignorant as we may be, we both know this: Japan has faced much worse and overcome much greater hardships than the ones it faces now.

There was a picture in the New York Times today, taken in Tohoku, which caught my eye and reminded me of something. In it, a bunch of ojii-san [grand-dads] were arranged in a circle, like stones, around a fire built from smashed houses. They were all sitting in different kinds of chairs—metal, wood, canvas—some of them broken—also probably collected from the rubble. They looked tired, dirty, a bit hungry, but not defeated. A heavy sky hovered above them—dark blue—like an on-rushing sea. But there they sat, outside, keeping warm, defying the darkness gathered above with a little fire they had lit themselves: a fire which all the collected forces of nature could not put out.

That fire is like my feelings for you. That fire is your friendship with Koji. That is the fire which draws people from all over the world to search for survivors in Tohoku. That is hope. Whatever happens, ojii-san, we must take care it is never extinguished.

So, tell Koji I say, “Hi.” Remember to bundle up. Remember to keep warm. Remember I love you.

Even if, in the next few days, I do feel the need to send you a case of SPAM…

Second Thoughts

2011-03-10T13:03:00.010-05:00

For Gavin

I admit, I had them. Second thoughts.
You said that Verlaine and Rimbaud might be
the sort of partnership we could explore
poetically. I groaned inside, “Here we go—
how boring, how predictable, no way—
how un-American. He wants to waste
my time, my tears and sweat, reviving a
withered pair of old French pricks.” No thanks.
I walked through the East Village eyeing others—
mostly chicks. That sad relationship
would never do: a lousy metaphor
Verlaine/Rimbaud—a vacant stretch of earth
so intensely alkali even
the few rocks living there all want to die.

A dizzy spell, a rest, a little chai,
you stirred around with a tattoo. The gym,
the sight of Omar’s smooth Brazilian glans—
peeping at my firm, white fanny through
his loose foreskin—tantalized my teeth.
You gave the problem of our partnership
a bit more thought. Americans we’d be:
Emily and Edna, Dickinson, Millay,
wild words for you, soiled sainthood for me.
You made an offer I could not refuse.
I got to travel to Kyoto and
sleep in cherry blossoms, study monks,
write imaginary letters to a friend
laid up with Meniere’s disease.

Since returning from Japan, you have
been many things to me besides dizzy,
Emily: Diane Arbus, Shiva, Gandalf,
goats, top the list of your identities;
you are a martyr to Satyriasis,
Antonius’s lover, Hadrian,
the Emperor of Bunny World. What
you have never been with me so far,
sweetheart, is vulnerable to harm.
Nor will you be that man until next week,
when we finally meet. Jet-lagged, sand-bagged,
you will learn with horror I am not
quite the gal you ordered—not at all.
I am Cleopatra. I studied art

under Julius Caesar: how the heart
divides in parts. I march through men like Gaul.

Out of Doors

2011-03-10T12:38:00.008-05:00

For Gavin

Not being a sleepwalker by nature, I
seldom find myself wandering into brick
shithouses by moonlight. I will drop by
the fridge to gnaw on a cold drumstick—

now and then—seized by hunger pangs—
the result of the treadmill. I’ve been doing
so much running. I want to look good for you
in Frisco, or Black Mountain, wherever

pale asses glow most poetically by night.
I am thinking of myself here. I see
me—for no good reason—because I am
incarcerated in a gray cubicle—

abandoning treadmills for roads—doing
dirty things out doors: lying under
a tree, sharing a green sleeping bag—
well-fed, well-fucked—well, wondering if

this sort of life would make me happy—
if, God forbid, this fantasy came true.

Ashes to Asses, Dust to Lust

2011-03-10T12:02:00.012-05:00

For Gavin

Don’t misunderstand me, dear. I’m wed
to speculation, for our future is
not carved in stone. If my tight fanny fits
atop your cock, or it buckles, we shall

learn. For breakfast to exist in any form—
a gentle lay at dawn or Bloody Mary
at brunch—we must reserve a seat—at least
have a destination in mind. I have come

home from brunch, to find my house burning,
a smoke choked sky, and, to my astonishment,
laughed, lit a cigarette, happy I was
full and carried a toothbrush in my bag.

When the police allowed me back inside,
I cried a bit—it’s true—my windows smashed,
bed glittering with glass, that day destroyed.
But I was insured for fire. I found

no pearls among my debris, just CDs.
I open cases now—15 years
later—to find dead musicians veiled
in soot. Unplayable discs. These I replace

with new recordings. Life goes on.

Porn and Poetry

2011-03-09T15:40:00.015-05:00

For Gavin

Our audience, I think, could not care less
if I love you, as long as we have sex
at some stage in this book. I suggest
a public consummation best performed
in San Francisco, New York, or Berlin—
unless the Vatican’s available—some
great city frothy with hot spunk and piss,
the gay equivalents of milk and honey.

I’m proud to say I’ve never disappointed
a paying customer in my entire
life. I’m always glad to grab my shins—
to cackle, squeal, or bray—imitate
the perfect piglet, chicken, or wild donkey
the poor things dream of boning in the dark.
I know what men want. Pornography
enjoys a wider base of fans than love.

Ulysses and Penelope

2011-03-09T15:16:00.007-05:00

For Gavin

Ulysses and Penelope, maybe
I was wrong to look at us this way—
as human beings, not the things we are:
demigods, a race apart. Although
it kills me to admit mistakes, so
be it. In San Francisco, I shall see
you only commit bestiality.

Daedalus and Icarus

2011-03-08T17:16:00.007-05:00

For Gavin

Behold this blue bath towel: a
clean place to masturbate. My fate
falls to its surface, like wax
and feathers. There is no escape

for me. I’m Icarus tonight,
delighting in that dizzy dash
upward—ever upward—toward
a small, heart-breaking splash

below. Watch as my white hand
disappears in the Aegean.

Crossing Legs

2011-03-08T12:22:00.003-05:00

For Gavin

Help me hold it. If I wake tonight,
will you place your thigh against my crotch?
I'll pillow you in pubic hair, so light,
so curly and so warm. Let me watch

your silver chest descending as you sleep,
illuminated by a square of moon.
Shift your weight slightly, should I creep
up with an erection. It’s too soon.

Move again and bring your leg to rest
a little higher. Close to tears, un-
able to dissolve, I will confess—
I’ve got to go, to piss, I’m dying. None

could endure such torture. “Hold it in,
babe. This is love,” whisper with your shin.

Diptych

2011-03-04T12:01:00.017-05:00

I have already posted The Camel in the side bar, but since these two poems form a single sequence of thought, I thought it would make more sense to post them one after the other as they will appear in the book I am writing with Gavin.

Both, of course, are dedicated to him.

The Camel

The love is in the writing, yes. It is
this pencil—architect of all my hopes.
I suck on my eraser, like a nipple.
The friction of the lead provides some heat.
The little squiggles which adorn my man-
uscript, swim wonderfully between the
lines, like freshly ejected sperm,
seeking, out of instinct, a nice, warm
place they can kick off their flippers,
crack a Michelob, exhausted, and unwind.
A mouth, a hand, some other place. Who knows?

Your last poem mentioned your career,
retiring from porn, continuing to appear
naked, reading poetry in California.
I was in college then, learning from my dad
sucking cock was probably something
a boy in Buffalo ought not to do.
Soon after he discovered my diary,
I found myself searching for a butt one
night along the shoulder of a road
so dark it seemed to lead into a future
paved entirely in blackness, coal.

A scattering of stars, a slice of Moon,
the prick of a pink planet, Mars, I think,
took pity on me, like the passing cars.
Those headlights allowed me to pick out
a discarded pack of Camels which
concealed one cigarette and puff of air.
How incredible that find: how Moon
and Mars, Camel and cars, kept
me company that night. But the sparks
of a tossed Marlboro let me smoke
where I was going—a dim, orange glow.

I thanked the driver as he sped away,
truck dwindling to a pair of rubies. I
had no matches in my pocket—no-
thing useful, no money, no house keys:
a Latin book in my backpack, Ovid’s
Metamorphoses, toothbrush, clothes,
socks and soiled underwear. And still
how lucky I felt—and not too cold—
now that I could smoke. The poetry
we’d write together was so far away—
farther than Mars, that truck driver, you

standing naked in L.A. And love,
while that Camel lasted, didn’t seem
a possibility all that remote.

Damascus

Yes, pick me up, dust me off, fill
my mouth with testicles, goat-cheese, grapes,
change my oil, enlarge my cock, replace
my heart with something softer than the plum
stone I suspect is throbbing there. Be
Prometheus to me, be Frankenstein, but leave
the memory of that lonely road intact.
I wasn’t ready then—to hold a pen
or penis properly. Forget a hand.
There is this transformation I still have
to undergo, to be myself. I smoked

that solitary Camel to Damascus.
The butt the truck driver flung from his cab
seemed a sign—a well-meant meteor
crashing against the asphalt, splashing sparks,
rolling to a stop ten feet away,
glowing. I ran to pick it up, before
the filthy filter put the fire out! I had
no matches, maybe, but I had a chance
to put one corner of my Cosmos right,
light the lost cigarette I found—to
let my lungs fill up with poetry.

To accept the universe like this,
to welcome an old Camel as just one
of those small gifts which Providence bestows,
is harder for me now than it was then.
I’m older and less flexible. I’ve lost
some of my looks, the hair I once dyed red,
my combat boots, the 1950s trench
I pawned my silver boom box for—
all those external things I thought were me—
adorn a boy I fear is dead. His ghost

appears in steamy windows. He haunts
my eyes when I am shaving. When I fuck,
I make the love he was incapable of
making. I do this in his memory.
I regard tattoos and scars the way
he looked at certain birthdays. Something must
remain besides the pools of melting ice
cream and wax. Still pictures. Poetry.
All we carry over from the past.
Stale Camels. Cars. A butt flung from a truck
rolling to a stop somewhere. Like here.

A Dog’s Life

2011-03-02T11:07:00.025-05:00

For Gavin

I can’t take this anymore—I’m sore—
leave me alone—get out of my head!
I closed my eyes five times today, felt you
knocking wildly against my prostate—as if
my prostate were my heart—spurting soul

each time I came. I licked my fingers to
replenish my insides. I am a husk.
My skin seems alien. I can’t touch myself,
even to wash, without feeling your
hands holding the soap. When standing

before the mirror after swimming, I
squirt moisturizing cream into my palm,
bend over, rub my shins, my knees, my thighs,
my muscles stiffen, like a giant cock
I am stroking in public. My body

must belong to you. I am a dog,
a Victor dog, a werewolf spinning round
in circles to the sound of a new master’s voice.
Whatever crazy music you desire
to hear me howling at the moon, I play.

The Lost Generation

2011-02-28T12:03:00.010-05:00

Yesterday the last American veteran of World War I, Mr. Frank W. Buckles, died in West Virgina at the age of 110. 65 million people were mobilized for World War I. As of this writing, only two remain.

Gertrude Stein called them the Lost Generation. Perhaps nobody really personifies that feeling of futility for us better than Wilfred Owen. Owen was shot crossing the Sambre-Oise canal on November 4th , 1918, exactly one week before The Armistice was declared. Owen's mother received the telegram confirming his death the very day the bells began ringing in England, pealing the end of The War To End All Wars.

Today, in memory of Frank, and all of the others, living, dead, or scheduled to be swept away by events in the 21st Century, I would like to post a poem by Wilfred Owen. Not his most famous poem, but I think one of his most poignant and perfectly realized.

Futility

Move him into the sun—
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.

Think how it wakes the seeds—
Woke once the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides
Full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
—O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth's sleep at all?

The Day Of Apocalypse

2011-02-25T12:17:00.041-05:00

For Gavin

It’s hard to see the future as a land
rising from magma deposits, bright
rivers of lava, pyroclastic clouds,
volcanic vomitus boiling from blue waves.
I must have some sort of blindspot.

I feel my way forward like Gloucester
in King Lear, smelling my way to Dover.
I shower. When I pull a washcloth between
my legs, after my morning dump, things
in Dover can look pretty bad. I hang

the soiled cloth on a steel rail to dry,
then I soap up my hands. I pluck my peach
cleft aside, rinsing off an asterisk—
the Southern star I have so often used
to orient myself at night, sliding

through the sea in search of spices. I
survey my world through a tiny vent,
a window cracked to let the steam escape.
I can see Queens: a tall oak tree, and three
old ladies with Ziplocks full of cooked rice.

The Fates! A Buddhist with a bowl accepts
their offerings with a bow of thanks.
I’m thankful, too—for what I can perceive:
green leaves and gratitude. Tomorrow might
erupt like a volcano, I suppose,

blowing me sky-high. I’ll cope. Maybe
I will land in your arms, if it does.

Burnt Fingers

2011-02-24T15:32:00.033-05:00

For Gavin

I never leave a man without a souvenir—
a name, a mole, a memory, a pearl,
how dark, how light, how his sweat glands have
scattered scents about his frame like seeds

which flower into poems. In your case,
the poem has preceded you. You are
cold water on a blister here, as I
cool a burn I got when grabbing the

handle of a hot pan. I forgot
to find a good potholder, since I thought
I was grabbing you. I bet your lips
feel better on a blister. More like ice.

Or maybe liquid nitrogen. I’ll see.

No Agenda

2011-02-19T09:31:00.018-05:00

For Gavin

I’ve never asked for an agenda, dear,
only you—content to follow where
a moment leads: another moment, Mars,
an elephant tattoo, a rabbit hutch,
mosquitoes, Maui, mountains, sex,

love plain and simple. Still, I must confess,
each poem I compose for you, I die
a bit in writing—mingling my dust
with yours. There might be better ways to spend
my afternoons. But not eternity.

Strange Meeting

2011-02-19T08:19:00.047-05:00

For Gavin

Would we have over-looked each other
in passing—pissing at a gym urinal,
or shopping for some carrots at the store?

What a stupid question. Here we are.
My dick is thicker, thanks to you. Just like
when I stood in Waterstone’s, pulled your book

off the shelf, ignoring all the others. Did
your orange cover catch my eye? Your spine?
Did something you say seize my scrotum, “You

had better take me home if you want these
back, boy.” I’ve no idea. I just paid
my money, took you home. A whim. That choice

has altered all of my tomorrows now.
Graying—about the age I am today—
I looked at your portrait twelve years ago—

new to me as an exotic newt. Cute.
I studied your expression and compared
dust jacket photo to the words inside—

looking for insight. Here’s what I learned:
your bartender is Trebor, you like Poles,
you shoot wild cats. You wrote an epitaph

that rhymes, just like John Gay. Yes, we might have
never met. We might have died a thousand ways
today. But here we are. Imagine that.

Curriculum Vitae

2011-02-18T14:00:00.095-05:00

For Gavin

Something human I can hold. If only
cameras captured living things. It seems like
we’re coming to that freakish place where
men are less mythic, monolithic, flesh
and blood. This must be where the talk-
ing stops, we start to smell something strange,
like gas. We look into each other’s eyes
and see our limits and desires for the first
time. “Is that the moon in there or me?”
We ask the odd homonculi reflected in
our skulls if these small images are souls,

our words wide open windows where
the breeze is soft and tropical. Or gas.
I’m in New York and I have nothing but
a leaky oven here to keep me warm—
words and pictures to manipulate:
the lease I signed allows no other pets.
Maybe I’ll make a cup of tea. First
a piss. It sounds like rain. Listen. Words.
They have no taste, no texture, and no smell.
These are my poems. They are sad—pale
yellow substitutes for the pink tongue

I crave to run along your clean crack.
I wish that words were more reassuring
like maps. I’ve been studying your woods,
you know, North Carolina, your intended
home. I would kill to climb a tree. Should I
apply for a position there? A pine cone?
A cat? A forest pixie? I’ll submit
a sample of my urine—my Curriculum
Vitae. Not my life. A sketch. A crude
outline in a tiddle-cup. Feel free
to test it, once you’ve fed the chickens.

My family is…they’re far away. I called
my granny twice a day for 20 years.
She had a massive stroke last summer, died
in church, just as I said the day before.
I never miss appointments. I’d prefer
a fling with Figaro to Madame Butterfly—
one happy ending to three hours of drama.
My favorite English poem is “To His
Coy Mistress.” My favorite poet must be this
guy, Gavin Dillard, although it is a photo-
finish: you and Shakespeare tied with Ovid.

My cock is 19 inches. Hard. It is.
I’ve never measured its circumference, nor
received complaints about its size—just groans—
which don’t count as complaints. I do like dogs.
I detest Mark Doty. Overwritten. Overrated.
I love one man at a time. I have this
trouble separating my dick from my heart.
I manage desolation with a dildo, since
it doesn’t leave an aftertaste like bad cologne.
I’d rather swim than dance, unless it is
to slam with skins. I worry I will die alone.

Interview With ‘The Nervous Breakdown’

2011-02-15T07:26:00.007-05:00

To complement the release of my queer little chapbook, Terence, I have been talking with Wendy Chin-Tanner about Terence and on-demand publishing at The Nervous Breakdown.

If you have a few minutes, join the party! Drop by, check it out, maybe leave a comment in the on-going dialogue.

How I See You

2011-02-13T11:43:00.036-05:00

For Gavin

Today, I saw a hunk in a wife-beater in
a picture, posing, freshly inked. His purple
elephants, linked trunk to tail, still looked
a little painful, pink, raw and tender
in places. Who was he? He looked like you.

No, not Gavin Geoffrey, in the flesh,
undressing for success—another you.
The tuft of armpit there, against your wife-
beating white, didn’t arouse those elephants,
though it affected parts of me. Tonight,

before I went to bed, I looked through all
the photos I possessed of you—younger,
older, picking out my favorite. You
sit beside a gorgeous Grammatophyllum,
wearing a black hoodie and glasses.

You’ll think I am crazy, but I can read
through your lenses better than you—what
is written there around your eyes by Time—
the poetry of God or Fate—whatever
name we assign the genius with the pen.

That man is mine. Remove it all—the frames,
the hoodie, orchid, elephants, old
and new tattoos—there’s my Naked Poet:
all that you are, just as you appear.
The essential man. So essential to me.

Us

2011-02-13T11:24:00.044-05:00

For Gavin

We must be mutants then. The DNA
tests confirm it. And our love for combat
boots, angora sweaters, animals,
the ones we used to fuck like mad, but now
we must feed. We are nurses. We can

handle nukes in nylons. We absorb
cosmic rays. We write poems and plays
which baffle all the critics because love,
like life, is so damn baffling. Shakespeare
would understand us. Sappho. Housman.

Housman the best. Dog and cat lovers.
Apple people. Adam. Eve. I believe
a lad I liked and almost slept with once—
named Steve—no relation to the saint
I kissed goodbye and never saw again.

Who are we then? We few, that happy few,
the lucky ones, that band of others, who
stood at Stonewall, Dunkirk, and Thermopylae
against barbarians. We are their tongues,
lungs, vocal cords—the voices of the dead.

We are unlikely heroes, you and I:
naked, standing up against the sky.

Terence

2011-02-12T21:00:00.018-05:00

It has taken me two years to write and subtracted ten years from my life, but I have finally published my first book, a little book, a chapbook, Terence.

From the publisher:

What makes us human? What makes us different? In the tradition of ‘Vladimir Nabokov’s ‘Pale Fire,’ Eric Norris looks at life as a corrupted text, with the greatest meaning lingering just at the margins of error. ‘Terence’ tells the story of a bewildered boxer’s love for a beautiful young man he meets at the gym, complicated by the untimely appearance of a cow.

It is a very strange story. Terence approaches the problems of life and love from a different angle, obtuse at times, acute at others, but hopefully enjoyable for all.

(If you are curious about the cow, click here to read an excerpt.)

As always, thanks for dropping by.

The Snowman

2011-02-01T11:37:00.026-05:00

For Andrew

Unable to refuse the Medicis,
His patrons, the young Michelangelo
Trudged through drifts higher than his knees
To build the family a man of snow.

To reassure the Florentines the sky
Above held firm, this white apocalypse
Meant nothing, the new prince felt he must try
Something. Michelangelo kept his

Opinions to himself. They paid him gold.
Torches blazed behind the falling flakes,
Like heretics; in Italy, a cold
French army pounded in their own tent stakes.

The Medicis would be deposed. Next year,
Savanarola would be burning books,
Botticellis, mirrors. More would cheer
When he was burnt at the stake. But it looks

Like nobody had bothered to record
What Michelangelo sculpted that night.
No sketch survives, not a private word
Set down in any diary with delight.

Ice Wine

2010-12-21T13:34:00.012-05:00

As the light withdraws, I concentrate
On summer, other days, warm memories.
I see the ice congealing on those grapes
Missed during the September harvest, left
Clinging to the vines. Perhaps it’s time

To close my eyes, to let the cold be cold
And not complain about stiff fingers. I’m
Sure I’ll find the strength inside to let
The winter work its magic on me, too.

A Stick of Incense

2010-12-12T12:18:00.006-05:00

For Gavin

The litter other lovers
Leave always appears
So poignant in the dark:
Kleenex, condoms, sad
Old ghosts exchanging
Ectoplasmic spasms.

Let us leave nothing
Sad as this behind—
Not even our footprints—
Just our scent, the smell of
Something burning
Sweetly. Let us leave

A stick of incense.
Wherever we wind up,
We go together, hand
In hand—aware
That, fuck or suck, we
Knelt on holy ground.

Reading the Auspices

2010-12-12T12:03:00.004-05:00

For Gavin

Yes, I am going to the priest.
There’s no point in concealing it.
I’ve lost two pounds. Nothing
Feels at home inside my mouth.
I cannot eat. Strange prodigies
Surround me. Look, just yesterday,

The clerical collar of a cock—
A very snug white foreskin
Belonging to a beautiful Pole—
Evaporated before my eyes—
In a puff of satanic smoke—
When I opened the steamroom door.

If this were not bad enough—
I suffered an erection when
I was assaulted in Grand Central
By cinnamon and baked apples—
So strong a scent the station
Took on Edenic overtones.

Tonight, I donned a sweaty black
Pair of running shorts and ran
To my bodega for beer—into
A pair of trannies. They squeezed
My testicles so hard with their eyes
My balls began to bleed like stones.

Are these good signs or bad? Each day
I get a billet doux—a poem.
I am in love, I think. But will
The poems cease if my guts
Run out of fresh entrails for you
To read, review, and analyze?

Four Koans

2010-12-12T11:37:00.007-05:00

For Gavin

The sound of a pen
moving does not
a poem make, although
that pen may still contain
a multitude.

Your soul remains
more ink to me
than man: something
fluid I try
to grasp, like hope.

When I am tired,
my language sharp,
the mantra which
my heart repeats
is very soft—

so listen close.
Put your ear
against the phone
and close your eyes:
the sounds of home.

Strange Lights

2010-12-12T11:30:00.025-05:00

For Gavin

Don’t think me cynical
if I find love incredible—
miraculous as that
distant day I first
heard it described in
the salty language sailors use
by a man I met inside
a misty waterfront tavern.
I stood a round of drinks to
hear his spectacular stories—
reports of fire dancing—
mastheads at midnight—
the South China Sea—
the center of violent typhoons.

I’ve read of love in shady
journals: strange reports—
couples coupling in cars
parked in desolate areas
seeing inexplicable lights
emanating from above.
Some say they were kidnapped
by cold-fingered aliens,
intimately probed,
then quietly returned to earth,
anesthetized. Still,
I have yet to see one
souvenir pillow
embroidered “Andromeda.”

The most credible account
I’ve found occurs inside
the Chronicles of Canterbury.
There, before the Feast
of St. John the Baptist,
in the year 1178,
five monks witnessed a
large meteor strike the moon:
its horns split in two—
spewing molten rock into
outerspace. This is
recorded by Gervase,
a reliable historian.
A man of God.

I think of myself when
I think of Gervase;
I think of strange lights when
I think of you. Clearly,
love is a celestial
event. You even
lead me to believe
all these stories are true.

A Prayer to Shiva

2010-12-12T11:26:00.013-05:00

For Gavin

Thunder, thunder, thunder.
Bitch, bitch, bitch.
What kind of performance is this?
Here I am prostrate before you—
All humility—on
All fours, ass in the air,
A perfectly submissive creature.
What do you do? You bitch.
You topple empires, skip galaxies
Across the emptiness
Like rocks across a pond.
Lord, it must be boring
Out there in the universe.
Next thing you know you’ll start
Pulling wings off flies. What

A strange god you are.
Look, Shiva, before
You draw a black line through
Creation, or, on second thought,
Crumple the whole thing
Up, toss it over your
Great shoulders, like so
Much waste paper, why don’t
You take a lesson from
Zeus? Just drop by in a shower
Of gold—for a good time?
Just you and me. Why not
Make it tonight? The stars do not
Need you as much I do.
Loved or unloved, up there,
They will continue to shine.

The End of Rhyme

2010-11-17T16:28:00.023-05:00

For Gavin

I do not have cold feet. I am afraid,
When this is finished, I will have to find
Something else to do besides write
Chatty letters and love poetry.

As much as coffee, your e-mails have
Become a part of my morning routine.
How should I wake up to a blank screen—
Nothing from Gavin Dillard? I mean,

We close this book, one chapter of our lives,
Begin another one tonight, in flesh,
Fresh ink, fresh paper, new possibilities.
The words we’ve written will remain. But

What will we make of all that we have done
When we wake in San Francisco? Will
We leave behind those separate lives
We lived before? How will we appear

To one another in the morning? How
Much older, fatter, or more frail,
A thousand years from now? I hope we’ll be
Associated then, at least on paper,

Less with art, than a belief in love.
Though Maui and New York, 6,000 miles,
Age, HIV, experience, different
Styles of writing and sleep schedules

Might have concluded things another way,
Before we found a publisher, you
And I found Bryan. Here we go then. Down.
I must put my laptop away. It seems

We’ve started our descent for Oakland.
I will be holding you in a few hours.
Meanwhile, I plan to close my eyes and pray
We both land safely. What else can I say?

Cashew Nuts

2010-11-11T16:00:00.019-05:00

For Gavin

Cold feet? Not on this flight.
Just small horns and cloven hooves,
as behooves a ghoul like me:
poet, runner, Nabokov lover,
Olympic class badminton champion
according the tale I told Wendi—
a fan—a Facebook buddy—who
told me you were digging up
dirt on Eric Thomas Norris. I
fed her the false badmintion story.
You believed it. Hah! Now,
hold on to your testicles while I
bat them. Badminton. Honestly.
You’re still a little brother, eyes
gigantic, blossoming with wonder.
What will I do with you? Before
you answer that poetically,
curse me out for impudence, please
remember that I am at JFK
about to catch a plane. I’m starving,
surrounded by stale sandwiches,
globs of gray humus, sun-flower
seeds and other tasteless treats.
You probably had a nice breakfast:
SPAM and eggs, toasted pineapple,
washed down with some exotic tea
which only grows in Borneo.
I see you there, in Paradise,
purple dressing gown, buttering
a spelt muffin with a machete—
A touch of Noel Coward’s ennui.
See how Heaven favors you?
The Gods have punished me. I
accidentally bit into a cashew
concealed inside a packet of
mixed nuts. I am in trouble now,
practically erupting into hives.
The last time I ate cashews, I went
into anaphylactic shock, nearly
died, when my blood pressure
Collapsed. Calm down. Relax.
I took one bite this time. Enough
to almost kill me, just enough
to tighten up my throat—to give
my voice the necessary texture—
depth of tone—so you receive
a spectacular blow-job later.

Revenge

2010-11-10T07:58:00.019-05:00

For Gavin

I am learning how to bleed
Without clotting. To be myself,
In other words, submit to what
My heart is telling me. You are
The most irritating prick I’ve
Never met. You won’t stop poking
Your nose in my most private parts.
You should be crucified. You

Ask for blood. Well, here it is.
Just leave my veins running in-
Definitely. I won’t run out.
I know I love you, since you bring
No peace of mind, no solace, no-
Thing, but insomnia and
Strange fevers at odd hours. God
Damn your appetite. Your mouth.

This is what I look forward to.
Torment. Waking up at 4:00
AM, checking my e-mail
To see if you have written. No.
You shit and trample on my dreams
Even when you say nice things.
Absurd. You—you sleep peacefully
A million miles away. That is

Not fair. That is not fair at all.
So I am sending a cloud of
Mosquitoes to drive you mad.
A few may have malaria,
So you had better smack the right ones.
They will be there, biting you,
Buzzing in your ears tonight,
So you can feel what I feel. Now.

Mosquitoes

2010-11-06T10:40:00.013-04:00

For Gavin

You burned all your wood last night, you say.
Let’s see if I have anything you can
Haul back to Maui for those wretched nights—
When you’re hemmed in by darkness, pouring rain,
Trapped in the tropics, slapping phantoms, those
Mosquitoes sucking all your blood away.

I’ll look around New York, see what I have:
A coffee table, couch, bed, some books—
Mostly memorized. My life is yours,
If you can carry it. Chop it up. Stick
It in your hearth, or build a fire out back—
Invite the insects to enjoy the blaze.

None of my possessions make sense anymore
Except as kindling. What good are books
In bed—even yours? All I want is you.
Poems might as well be mosquitoes for all
The joy they give. Burn them. Burn everything.
Fuck everything. Let’s go somewhere else and live.

The Lay Of The Land

2010-11-04T10:44:00.025-04:00

For Gavin

However the topography turns out—
How green the grass, how succulent the clover,
How many trees, the quantity of shade,
How the branches vary through the seasons,

Through all weathers, fair or foul, if clouds
Define the upper boundaries of the place,
If a sprinkling of thistles, stars, should form
The borders I bump up against—I know

These features, fences, all of these limits
Amount to nothing—one of those old jokes
Time and space will make at our expense.
I feel your arms enfolding me, like Freddy,

That bright black billy in your photograph.
The area inside your heart is vast
According to our numbers. See, we are
No ordinary goats. We’ve done the math.

Mundus Cuniculi

2010-11-03T15:10:00.028-04:00

For Gavin

Of all your incarnations—
from growling Siva to
pipe blowing Pan,
to Miss Emily Dick-
inson, who borrows your
mouth, occasionally,
whispering suggestions
into my pink, erect
blushingly sensitive
rabbit ears—this curious
blend of personnae—
Adam and Hadrian—
animal man and Roman
emperor—suits
your affections best.

No fig leaves for you,
no Eden either, now
painfully aware how
booby-trapped apples
tend to explode.
You mind your mattock,
count your chickens,
look after your goats,
having learned the hard
way about gardens:
you acknowledge your
past, then bathe
your ass. Paradise—
you have other things—
other concerns. Like Eve,

you are a busy man.
you have concrete
to pour—a Mundus
Cuniculi—a Bunny
World to build—
a legacy to leave
behind for all
the furry creatures
who have been nursed
in your lap, called
your pubic bone
a home. I think
when you depart this
volcanic island
sanctuary, Maui, for

the life hereafter, Black
Mountain, North
Carolina, no one
will feel abandoned by
an absconded God
goofing off in Asheville.
Bunny World will
remain: evidence a
few emperors exist
besides Caligula.
I bet, in the future,
small mammals will regard
your works with wonder, like
lost hikers do the wall
of Hadrian. (Who,
you know, was gay.)

Commuter Blues

2010-11-02T17:39:00.004-04:00

For Gavin

Leaning against a leaky lav-
This morning on the 8:04
Express, hurtling toward another
Day in New York, I read the piece

You sent last night. I felt so sad.
The sun seemed bright and pointless—
A single knitting needle stuck
Through a big ball of orange yarn.

I’ve nothing to look forward to—
There’s nothing on my schedule—
Except the poem I will write
For you. I’m always happy to

Write poems. But I’m afraid
Art is not enough. No
Matter what I say, or do,
That happy feeling never lasts.

Animal Sanctuary

2010-10-31T20:01:00.014-04:00

For Gavin

I’m sure your rabbits will be happy there.
Yours sounds much friendlier than mine—
That asylum I was once placed in—
Church: a clean, cadaverous Baptist
Interior, supported by dark ribs,
A space capable of accommodating
A thousand souls according to the fire
Code restrictions. It was Hell. Our
Choir sang hymns in satin pajamas, blue,
Piano on the left, organ on the right,
A madman in the middle. I would poke
Holes in his upholstery with a pencil
I kept sharp for that specific purpose.
I longed for an Apocalypse—a really
Loud fart—a nuclear catastrophe—
A final trumpet—to put an end to the
Announcements—meetings, births, deaths—
Epistles to the Galatians, Colossians,
Galoshes, Dalmatians, and the wrinkly
Sound of hands, in unison, just
Flipping pages. It went on forever.
The Lord’s Supper proved such a meager
Meal, hardly even a snack, really—
Matzo fragments and a thimble of Welch’s
Grape juice—which I was forbidden. (I
Was not baptized.) I wanted to get
Out, go to McDonald’s, anywhere,
For lunch. I poked the pew impatiently,
I drew a zillion pairs of Golden Arches—
MMMMMM—in the back of my Bible—
Filling up the white end pages—those
God left blank after Revelations. I
Loved the hymns. I loathed the sermons. They
Ended with Amens at one, with my
Stomach angrily growling. That’s why
I am so glad you’re adding your own
Ecclesiastical flair to that Maui
Sanctuary. I bet communion in
Any safe haven you would devise
Would keep demented parsons out, but still
Admit a few strange boys in bunny suits—
Those looking to gnaw on a raw carrot,
Or thirsty for some unusual tipple,
You would smile and generously provide.

The Camel

2010-10-28T16:55:00.015-04:00

For Gavin

The love is in the writing, yes. It is
This pencil—architect of all my hopes.
I suck on my eraser, like a nipple.
The friction of the lead provides some heat.
The little squiggles which adorn my man-
Uscript, swim wonderfully between the
Lines, like freshly ejected sperm,
Seeking, out of instinct, a nice, warm
Place they can kick off their flippers,
Crack a Michelob, exhausted, and unwind.
A mouth, a hand, some other place. Who knows?

Your last poem mentioned your career,
Retiring from porn, continuing to appear
Naked, reading poetry in California.
I was in college then, learning from my dad
Sucking cock was probably something
A boy in Buffalo ought not to do.
Soon after he discovered my diary,
I found myself searching for a butt one
Night along the shoulder of a road
So dark it seemed to lead into a future
Paved entirely in blackness, coal.

A scattering of stars, a slice of Moon,
The prick of a pink planet, Mars, I think,
Took pity on me, like the passing cars.
Those headlights allowed me to pick out
A discarded pack of Camels which
Concealed one cigarette and puff of air.
How incredible that find: how Moon
And Mars, Camel and cars, kept
Me company that night. But the sparks
Of a tossed Marlboro let me smoke
Where I was going—a dim, orange glow.

I thanked the driver as he sped away,
Truck dwindling to a pair of rubies. I
Had no matches in my pocket—no-
Thing useful, no money, no house keys:
A Latin book in my backpack, Ovid’s
Metamorphoses, toothbrush, clothes,
Socks and soiled underwear. And still
How lucky I felt—and not too cold—
Now that I could smoke. The poetry
We’d write together was so far away—
Farther than Mars, that truck driver, you

Standing naked in L.A. And love,
While that Camel lasted, didn’t seem
A possibility all that remote.

How To Write A Romance: Backwards

2010-10-27T21:58:00.012-04:00

For Gavin

Time is non-linear. Cause and effect
Reflect a thoughtless habit. There’s no law
Which says when you or I begin a book
We can’t start writing it from the rear-end.

True, there are Physicists who may object;
They might suggest that we have stacked the deck
In favor of a certain outcome. Well,
Perhaps we have. But what is wrong with that?

We’re poets, not professors, you and me,
A pair of horny homosexuals, crazed
With lust. We were not born to gather dust
Or chew up books in basements, like a rat.

I’m glad you started munching on my butt—
By butt, I mean those photographs I sent—
Instead of slowly plodding through my whole
Biography to understand me. Now,

The poetry awaits discovery:
The scent of citrus soap combined with sweat,
The tangy taste of something on your tongue
Implicit in those naked pictures. No,

Nothing is pre-ordained. You take that chance.
You asked me to remove my underpants.
I did. Then we continued writing, knowing
Exactly how the story would turn out.

Nosferatu

2010-10-26T16:10:00.007-04:00

For Gavin

Your absences are fangs.
They plunge in, then withdraw
My soul. I feel your mouth
Fixed below my jaw:

The space where you should be
Nestled in, my neck,
Is empty as my bed.
I do not expect

To wake and find a pair
Of punctures in my throat,
My curtains flapping, or
A gothic-scripted note.

Everything will be
Normal: window cracked,
A pillow on the floor,
Door locked. You’ll be back

Tonight. You’re always there,
Behind me, like the Past,
A shadow I can’t shake.
How can the Future cast

A shadow back in time—
Seize me by the wrist,
Twist me around to face
Days which don’t exist

Yet? Is that power yours?
I half believe it’s so,
Since you are reading this.
I need you now. Although

I am not certain why
I ought to feel that way.
I know that you’ll be back
To torture me tonight.

Not stay.

A Shropshire Lad

2010-10-23T15:32:00.010-04:00

For Gavin

Wherever you are, there I am.
I’ve really been there all along.
In all your songs, the quiet parts,
The place where you can hear your heart

Beating. I am there. Inside:
I stir the fires in your hearth,
Coals blanketed by ashes, softly
Smoldering, orange as dawn.

Woken by a cock, or clock,
Think of me as the lad who comes
With crumpled news, kindling, and lungs,
To poke the ashes, toast the bread.

He spoons the jelly in a dish,
Pours milk into a pewter pot,
He listens to the kettle sing.
He remembers everything,

How hot, how sweet, et cetera.
It’s all upstairs, inside my head:
All the things which I might bring,
Which you sometimes forget.

At The Window

2010-10-21T17:30:00.012-04:00

For Gavin

Vision is an act of will.
The blind may feel more features on
on a face than you or I
can see. Astronomers have
mapped a hundred billion stars
invisible to human eyes
in different kinds of light.

This morning, guided by a dull
and distant glow, I raised my
window blinds for the millionth time
thinking the logistics through
from the perspective of John Donne:
he’s half a planet away and no
closer. What is my dick to do?

The local universe hadn’t changed
much overnight: the oak leaves
outside seemed a little crispier,
the children’s coats a little puffier,
the people walking quicker—where-
ever they were going—work,
school, some appointment, home.

Still, the position of that bright
gray glob—the sun—reminded me
that—although geographically
Maui and New York might lay
exactly the same distance
apart on maps—your ass also

was twenty-four hours closer.
Even more, perhaps.

The Collaborators

2010-10-18T13:59:00.012-04:00

For Gavin

Chimeras, slaves, or funny faces,
What we are, we must become
Together. Kissing cousins, friends,
Lovers, bitter disappointments, they
Color all our sunsets. And yet

The more I talk to you, the more
I walk around my neighborhood
Until my poor iPhone drops dead—
Its batteries exhausted—the more
Each sunset seems irrelevant.

Some days ago, I can’t think when,
Or what I must have said, you placed
Your finger on a key, pressed send,
Applied some gentle pressure. We
Ceased to write separate poems

Then. I responded to your words.
My heart, stupid musclehead he is,
Continued pumping iron. I didn’t skip
A single meal. Nor did my bowels
Stop moving out of reverence for you.

The only thing I noticed was
The way I viewed blank paper had
Changed. Everything was different.
Then, each sheet became a bed
Where you and I could fuck forever.

Edna St. Vincent Millay Sends a Letter to Emily Dickinson from Kyoto

2010-10-16T12:52:00.008-04:00

For Gavin

I must apologize for the delay
in writing this. The flight from
New York was Hell—
cramped, full of crying, food
inedible. Still, you get hungry and
you eat, and you receive
constipation for
your pains. I’m never flying
coach again. But here

I am, Emily—Japan!
My hotel, the Garden Palace, has
put me in a cherry blossom
room—all pink—synthetic
silk bedspread, rice paper sheets.
The usual Hokusai reprint
leans from the wall above my bed
ready to drown my dreams:
‘The Great Wave
Off Kanagawa.’ You’ve seen it.
Mount Fuji, little boat,
dark tsunami looming
over it with foamy fingers.
You might think the people of
Japan only produced
one great picture.

You asked about the temples.
Well, they’re gigantic,
old and everywhere.
They all sell amulets and prayers—
long life, fertility, good fortune—
the standard wishes.
I bought all three for you,
dear, and one more
which shall, for now,
remain a mystery.

I rang their bells, smelled
their smells, found too many
monks attractive. Their grounds
overwhelm the senses
with such tightly controlled
forms of beauty: thick bamboo
groves, curious flowers,
a million varieties of moss.
They are about as close
to Heaven you can get
without jumping off
a cliff, I think. If only
the water in the ponds didn’t
seem so still, in certain places,
so serene, so stagnant,
such big brown eyes of
unfulfilled desires.
I would only consider
living here in a
missionary capacity.

You asked about the Ryoan-ji
temple specifically,
that famous rock garden.
This puzzled me
at first—the whole idea of
planting rocks outside
cemeteries. I had a look
for you today.
This is what I saw:
14 boulders, older
than anything built by
man. They sit on grass
medallions, surrounded by
combed white gravel. The brochure
says there are 15 boulders, but
from any seated angle just
14 are visible. Enlightenment
occurs when you can see
15, rise above
terrestrial concerns—
position, time and place—
I sat there for two hours
seeing 14 and I left
mildly frustrated.

Frustrated, that is, until
I wrote the word
‘frustrated,’ for you,
Emily, up there. Then I saw
my 15th boulder, yes, just then.
The word ‘frustrated’ put
the whole thing in
a Zen perspective: it is love.
Love is the one concern
I do find difficult
to rise above…

Invisible Ink

2010-10-15T14:30:00.030-04:00

For Gavin

According to The Telegraph—
September 21st, 2010—
in World War I, a lad
at London University learned
semen makes excellent ink for
secret messages: seminal
fluids don’t react to iodine
vapor, the standard chemical
tests, and gentlemen—spies,
prisoners, lovers—always
have access to fresh supplies—
fresh being the operative
word. Spunk can’t be stored
in the field very conveniently:
it quickly starts to stink,
giving the army away. If this
emboldened our boy to jack-
off in his lab and start
scribbling, the article didn’t say.
Nor did it reveal his name.
I suspect this fellow wrote
poetry in his spare time.

I remembered all this
this morning, reading about
your new tattoos. I pictured you—
beautifully bareback—
just yesterday, facedown,
under a hot, bright lamp,
a needle buzzing, you wincing a
bit, maybe, sipping a warm
bottle of disgusting beer—
as Circle, the artist,
inscribed a pachyderm
prancing proudly on your arm.
I also pictured myself
next month—biting
a pillow—my mouth full of
goose down. I wonder
what kind of marks your
teeth will leave on my
pale shoulders? What secret
messages—what poetry—
will you pick up your
pen to write? And how
will I feel afterwards,
when I can read your thoughts?
Will I regret that night?