mumber one

Notes on Seroconversion

Then & only then was it made clear: I was to be no different than the rest stepping out to toke menthols at the curb, standing tall & slack-jawed as we joked about our aging forms—this fresh stretch mark, that odd crash course—did you know there was more than one way to snake a drain? to sump a pump? to earn one’s crust?—eventually snuffing the butts to reenter the song & hall with an edged finesse, as seen in certain sub-sects of eels—the swarm of us, looking just as lithe & cosmopolitan beneath the stroboscopic lights; fueled by syrup & ice & salt on the rim & in these stolen seconds, when the self-loathing lowers its pitch, who wouldn’t be convinced they could exist: bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, not subject to bad trips or high rent or low T cell counts or tear gas or squalor— who wouldn’t be convinced, utterly convinced, to live might always feel

Feedback

Because what isn’t

Fed back? A time and place

For everything, my mother said,

But everything is A time, a place,

If you know to trace.

I carry my own face

And my mother’s,

And my father’s

Graceless shape; Both are overlaid.

A boy, I tried to rail against

The sect of men Who pick up rage but fell

Among the ranks anyway.

A boy, I was made

Effective in a lowly way, a ditch

In which this country’s scat

Falls fat.

When you’ve seen the image

Become word, the word

Become image again, “In the beginning” seems A useless trope.

Don’t speak to me of ends.

I’ve seen the legislated ditch

In which you’ve dropped

The dispossessed and young, hoping

We’d choke on our own

Mass. Why would you think that

Would last? Grown, we’ve come

Into our own, we’ve seen it all

Must be overthrown—

We, the people, the rank, the poor Muscled things

The ditch spits back.

“My idea of abstraction is white lightning”
Jack Whitten
Halfway between Gonyon and Ophelia imminent splendor. It doesn’t matter what I don’t know.
Clouds creating a blue fissure in the sky, whose grammar whose sadness hurries forth?
I want to speak to order: soybeans, corn, wheat rows browned to torpor.
Mercy. Protozoan, water-shorn, hotly I listen in the pines for my green name. Whoever can
stop reasoning, stop. Is it too much to ask tobe remade I who’ve just begun?
Adagio of light, copper-hued diadem
hanging on twilight’s hem, Virginia sun— I’m yet released from the
sharp language of being: make me anotherby morning lest I stay
in this vestibule wholly unmade

self/hood   Wearing today the diacritical preconception of otherness Approached thusly and code-ified, solidified in…

W 177th & Broadway
All night you eyed the man I wanted to be;
my jaw flexed tight. Anger slipped into
desire. Easily he would rise. Easily you would
disperse, pleasure made into light:
what you want under him,
I put on to amuse— I, your worked
supplicant. Yes, love is looking away.
My desire greened in your dismissal. Was
technicolor and twilight-made and never
turning off. The city air hung humid
above our charade. What need I could fill:
to transubstantiate, to unravel?

The Meaning of Life

The female bedbug says, “Fuck a hole through my stomach.”

The male bedbug says, “I have just the tool for the job.”

The female duck says, “Fuck me around and around and around.”

The drake says, “I have just the corkscrew for the job.”

The male bonobo says, “Fuck my wife. And then me. Then your wife, and her lover, which is me again.”

The male praying mantis says, “Fuck my brains out.”

The hermaphroditic flatworm says, “The thought of wrestling with you makes me super hard.”

The other hermaphroditic flatworm says, “The thought of wrestling makes me super hard, too. And sharp.”

It’s all fun until someone gets sperm in the bloodstream and has to lay the eggs.

The female trout says, “I will fuck the river.”

The male trout says, “I will fuck the river in the same place and not stick around to see what happens.”

The female angler fish sings, “Here comes the sun, little darling.”

The male angler fish sings, “I’ll stop the world and meld with you. Permanently.”

The whiptail lizard sings, “Like a virgin” and drops offspring whenever she pleases.

The male gingko tree entreats, “O Wind, willest thou bear my fuckspores over to that thin little sapling?”

The thin little sapling giggles, “Stop it, Wind, that tickles!”

The male porcupine thinks, “This better be worth it.”

“Let’s fuck tomorrow,” suggests the panda.

“Or,” suggests the other panda coyly, “we could fuck the day after tomorrow.”

The young chimpanzee has his mouth full, fellating himself, a hormonal Ouroboros.

All around, the bacteria scratch their itches and divide, moaning trillions of tiny moans, which is why silence is never quite silent.

Over the course of its lifetime, the leopard slug composes with its slime trail the following: “One

day I will dangle from a branch entwined with my beloved, a double helix slick and tightening, and the two translucent penises emerging from our heads will entwine as well, forming a pale globe across which our mutual seeds will travel like warm ocean currents.”

The dragonfly whispers, “Let’s do it midair, because when I come I want to be touching nothing but you.”

The luna moths do not whisper to each other, lacking mouthparts, coupling urgently as they perish on a diet of wind.

The moon, round and inanimate, looks down on them with pity. They cannot apologize for the way they are shaped, or the way they want the hurt.

The horse says, “Fuck me bareback.”

The oyster says, “Fuck me raw.”

And the cat says, “Fuck me doggy style.”