www.possibletoflesh.blogspot.com

Avoid the ship lanes, the tangle and first
things first: master the float.  Cold, like any departure,
is something you reconcile with time and there’s all the time
in the world to drift so long as you meet no shore.
Shores mean carcass, concerned crowds, media.

No threatened ship when I came by accident;
to earn your place stuffed for expo
one would have to be bigger than its captors
or Jurassic. Tentacles, no. All brain, no
gill. I am guilty of nothing but fleeing south. Rewards,
no. Palest flopper in a net of royal mackerels: fisherman have no use
for me. Take my hands for soup, toss the rest.

Flashlights on deck, all hands to.

His eyes were gorged for fear, years ago.
I look for him on every dating website,
hoping our tendencies to be too loud bring us together,
for his withering cheeks to jerk upright.
When he responds with bare-all pictures,
I will sell and accumulate, hundreds,
for revealing why his earliest powems
are written to the tune of his nude form jostling
slapping as he dances before his mirror.

Canaan is in the West, Petr
but you’re right here. Albany is in watercolors
today i am the rudest lobster
posted to bed sheets with filamented eyes.
There is something rustic about my giddy-up
like the design on a pack of soy sauce,
arched dragon with panda eyes and a marketed language.
Petr, you were a fool for learning all that Cantonese

How many lightning bugs have you gone through?
Night’s got its best threads on; do that trick for me
again, pinching their abdomen, under the brillo wings
and spread the neon glue to your gums.
You make me want to be a naturalist
and learn mountaineering with you Petr.
Hunting all day, I’ll bring you a bouquet of all these critters
and possibilities.
You ate worms on the playground during recess,
didn’t you Petr? C’m'ere
open that trap of yours: I’ve earned reassurance tonight.

Lone chair in a room of sofas:
great-Uncle Archie died alone in the chair in our den
but that was after mom and dad’s wedding
and that was after I was born a bastard.
Thats our dog’s chair now
and people will ask about our memories of dead relatives
and I will show them mustard pee-stains, clumps of blonde hair.

Armchair:
the only thing missing is a head.
When you can faithfully admitt to being a category crisis,
you are free to be headless.
I wasn’t allowed to play in the backyard
because behind the wooden fence was a lady-neighbor
who mom caught telling me stories through the planks about
her husband and how he was decapitated in 1994.

When “chair” is a position of power/status:
I wrote a short-story about families with fetishes
for antiques and this was a happy family
and invited a narrator to dinner.
A narrator whose hosts had a mahagony table
surrounded with de-comissioned electric chairs.
Their daughter, a middle-school 2nd-chair violinist,
jokes about the chance that everyone gets fried
in the midst of meatloaf and lumpy mashed potatoes.

Pray you undo this button. Thank you sir
Do you see this? Look on her! Look, her lips,
Look there, look there— he dies 

“There’s always time for remembering your ancestors”
my Grandmother was up on the Tiber shore with Iulus
between her lips. She buried him in a time capsule,
Columbus’s-landing-site, April 2017.
There’s a song for futures I’m forgetting now—
it will hit and when it hits me, I’ll sing you to sleep
in my Grandmother’s backyard, by the lilacs.

There’s a hidden picnic table
behind the teeth of the barking Queen
where powems grow out of the rotten wood
of Tiresias’s summerhouse, graffitied tomb:
L-A-U-R-A was H-E-R-E  Bastille Day, 2004;
I’ll be there at lunchtime, Kawenoke 1990,
somewhere between the Crisis at Oka and the time
when I forget what color your eyes are.

Back in our heydays—Motel Room 204b, Summer ’61—
with a gun to his head, you got Darwin to admit
lips serve no function, evolutionarily;
and the species Lover, Starcrossed: the greatest ploy
of any day ‘n age. Times winding down, faster and headfirst

into the languid belly of a puckered-face gyre
to the moment they tongued your eyes right from anchor
in the center of a make-shift Episcopalian church
in a VFW with rusted folding chairs where the R of Cassandra
is left to original sins and come up-’ns: Pasadena dry-land, 1833.
I’ve news: your pearly-whites are still the sailor’s pearl-white eyes
and have you looking good and smart, and good the lesser Ajax

isn’t much for the kissing—I start to think you look sleepier than usual
but I am not a prophet for those kinds of things.
I am more Times: New Roman; you are the Times Tables
memorized by all, remembered by few.
I’ll do my best to remember you this time,
though that old Roman stalker’s at it again, quite mad,
and making messes out of arsenals of kisses
so no one may know numbers, accounts or histories.

Speak. Speak to me. Why don’t you speak?
You’re going to speak to me like that?
Today? You speak like that today? Today is a milkshake.
milkshakes are every instance of waking alone-
but thats a matter for someone else.

Go write yourself a Gertrude Stein powem powem powem
[powems are so much fun powems powems powems powems]
in the bathtub next to the radio. That song is playing
you know, the one I heard for the first time
that one time we were naked in front your parents
and your dad was screaming and your mom–she had a look of really
haunting haunting recognition on her mug–

& me [oh ampersand hot] well I had scrotum in hand
and my hair was matted–yours was too
you’re a panter too–
and all

I could do

was laugh. Surprise party, baby.

Tonight I will drag you back to my place
and lay you across my sacred lawn chair
“What’s your favorite sonnet?” I’ll pant, croon 
a path across your amused, pill-eye face.
Witness: the curling-toe body of marr
iage and how OHLoveYou comes so soon.

There are grass stains on those pants, Mister Secretary
slip ‘em off in the rain storm and we’ll play
VietnamWarJungle between parked cars.

When all of this thaws you’ll leave me for sure
and our bathroom grab ass will be scandal, rumor,
gossip behind the ritual clearing of dining tables.

The Connecticut Police departments on their way-
would you come with me?