Three Poems

gay boys and the bridges who love them [II].

[wpaudio url=”/audio/8_1/sax1.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″]

saw it with my own headlamp.
lit halogen filament, breaking

between a thirteen year old’s haunted
hands, costumed in our realest ghosts.

we went door to door. unwrapping
hard candy and hard boiled eggs.

mouths of spray cans melted around pins
so the shaving cream flew in thin

white beams of light. toilet paper streaming
from three hundred year old trees.

you leaned into my shoulder as the cop
car passed like a black horse drawn

carriage, mouth ghosted my neck,
that first clean cigarette pulled

from the pack. we rubied in the blue
light. after the cavalry passed,

you turned to me. your face, a dark mask
hanging on the museum wall.

you leaned in.
you warm apparition.

when you pulled back
a thin bridge of spit.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/8_1/sax2.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″]

perfect, to escape in whiteness.
under the counter cabinet medicines.
the body, dreaming only of itself.

what numbness carries its warm
lantern through my starless blood?
what science can bottle a stoned

eucharist? let me lay here another hundred
years, until each knuckle grows a tiny beard.
both eyes burrowing into the dark

television, comforted by it’s darkness.
let me lay here, mother standing above me.
her face slack as an umbilical chord.

she holds a million tiny white eggs
inside her, each one a bottled god.
an orange bottle empty in her palm.

god mother, your blocking the screen.
calm mother, i’m dulled by the pharmacy.
i swallowed ten perfect white eggs

each one hatched suns in my stomach.
the children of distilled smoke dragons,
can’t you see them? their ten warm yolks

singing heat to my blood. your first grandsons
numb as my young body slung across the floor.

aren’t you amazed at how quiet i lay?
at how much labor goes into the terminus.

congratulations!

it’s a boy.
it’s a carton of expired eggs.
it’s a bleeding lamb.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/8_1/sax3.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″]

careful sam, remember this body
is your last. already, so many friends
have damaged their wiring or flooded

entirely. twenty six is the year talented
people die. thank goodness you’ve had
to work at this. sweating over the page

until it became something. equilibrium
is no high. good, you’ve stopped profiteering
off your friend’s injuries.

every mouth surgery and broken rib
was a beacon glittering sex in the distance.
your salted tongue pulling

you toward sustenance. when your lover
gifts you a wreath of medicines for your birthday,
with his brother’s sick name etched

into the bottle. stop. even when your tongue
sweats a hungry gutter, know that tongues
are supposed to water. what alchemy turns

gold leaf to bare trees? it is a war,
you know, the body pitted against itself.
the brain refusing to flood

your desiccated blood, unless you pray
to the appropriate gods. i’ve knelt for years
at a time before strange medicine cabinets,

swallowed entire beehives for a single
drop of honey. after all the opium
has been burned from the water,

after the smoke clears over this flaming
apiary of a home know you will only be left
with what you were born with

your breath,
your clean blood,
your new bones.