I.35

i watch him touch him                     self over a screen
and pretend                                    it is with my hands

how you pull a quiver                          from an arrow.

he moans and i grow               jealous of the satellites.
their capacity for translation,           to code his sound
in numbers                         unbraiding in my speakers
lucky metal                                      audience of cables.

i know the wireless signal is all                   around me,
that i’m drowning in his                   unrendered noise.

how from a thousand miles away                 i can dam
myself                with the light spilling from his hands.

what magic is this?                           distance collapsed
into the length of a human breath.   what witchcraft?

six years ago a bridge between us                   collapsed
the interstate ate                            thirteen people alive
asphalt spilling                             like amputated hands
into the dark below.                  what is love but a river
that exists to eat                       all your excess concrete

appendages?                what is a voice but how it lands
wet in the body?                                    what is distance
but a place that can be reshaped     through language?

how i emulate and pull a keyboard       from the ashes.

how i gave him a river             and he became it’s king.

how any thing collapsed                           can be rebuilt.
take our two heaving torsos                           take them

how they fall like a bridge into the water
how they rise up alone from the sweat.

BILDUNGSROMAN (SAY: PYOO-BUR-TEE).       

i never wanted to grow up to be anything horrible
as a man.  my  biggest fear was the hair they said
would    burst    from    my chest,    swamp    trees
breathing  as  i  ran.  i  prayed  for a different kind
of  puberty:  skin  transforming  into  floor boards,
muscle   into  cobwebs,   growing  pains  sounding
like  an  attic  groaning  under  the  weight  of  old
photo  albums.  as  a  kid  i  knew  that  there  was
a   car    burning    above   water   before   this  life,
that   i   woke   here   to   find   fire   scorched   my
hair  clean  off until i  shined like glass  –  my eyes,
two  acetylene  headlamps.   in my family we have
a    story    for    this.    my    brother   holding   me
in his hairless arms. says, dad it will be a monster

we should bury it.

MONSTER COUNTRY

god  bless all policemen  & their splintering  night  sticks splintering  &  lord
have mercy on their souls.  god bless judges in their  empty robes who send
young men off to prisons with a stain from their antiquated pens. god bless
all   the  king’s   monsters   &  all  the  kings  men.   god  bless  the  sentence
&  its  inevitable  conclusion.   god  bless  the  predators,   curators  of  small
sufferings.   god  bless  the  carpet  that  ate  one  hundred  dollars  of chris’s
cocaine.    god   bless   cocaine   &  the  colophon  of  severed  hands  it takes
to get to your nostrils.  god bless  petroleum  &  coffee  beans  &  sugar cane
&  rare  earth minerals  used to manufacture music boxes. god bless the gas
chamber  &  the gas  that makes the  shower head  sing. god bless the closet
i trapped  a  terrified  girl  in  with my  two  good  hands. god bless the night
those  good  boys   held  my face  to   a  brick   wall  &  god  bless those boys
& good god bless the strange heat that pressed back.

you cannot beg
for forgiveness
with a mouth