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FIRSTBORN

Who do you answer to?

A long blond fire. The gnomic pink cock of that office.
My lonesome hero licking a bicycle seat.

*

How often have you cherished the mundane?

A tattooed bicep shining in oil and the pink cakes when I was a boy ago.

*

Will you protect yourself from what you want?

The roadside beauty smelled of hunted animal fat.
I was never well-known.

*

Has your achievement required sacrifice?

No ornament, no sop. A grey-gabled room in West Virginia where it paces.
Repetition of mossed feet nailed in elevator pine.
No squirming out except for the thick braid.

*

Is a relaxed man a better man?

My cage had a beast’s dollhouse and a noose of garland I hung there.
A little glass orb in a cornflower mood slept on the littlest wicker chair.

*

Can abstraction be a type of decadence?

We gagged time over glittery yolks at the sky luncheonette.

*

Have you eaten yourself into your father figure?

Notice the sharp eel he casts on the ground.
The book still open to where he stopped thrashing.

*

Tell us your oldest fear.

What happened to you wasn’t art but a nip at the waist, a halo enclosing.

THE LETTER M

Herds of gallows emerald amulets clung near

the birth scar held crayfish eyes, warding off the low swoop of small-footed

bats near the forehead. Oblivion, creased. Tonight, I primp ruthless in scarlet

drawls, a blood pact drawn at first blush, the late-night hotlines & crushed gaudy

loveseats. Tabernacle cash sashes forced boyish feedings to lasso rambles.

Leatherette outlaw styles my eye at keyholes, tempting the god-knock,

kohls a mole bound to streak the dagger-tattooed chest of a lonely Earl.

Hardbacked & obedient in midnight oils, I hallucinate a crowded tray of oysters

concerted with netted lemon halves, shallow saucers of hill

country spinach, slipshod brandy. A hunger’s wingspan bucks & hurls

pink chalk children frying sunny-sides between the elm witch’s brass

whistle. Death’s pixel grin, braver at night, a limelight delusion whisks me

thin—O rabbit. My bandit’s molecules unhinge, considering even this honeyed grave

majuscule a warm mumble of sleepers nibbling the yard, swallowing medieval lion pins.

EASTER DRIVE

Clowns say so on lion-headed Sundays, as blonded suicide carnival floats

spiral my gloved wave. Under the coverlet, a coven of picked rotisseries

named Father, The Stepfather, Cock. They’ll put you away for that, you know,

and take your chewing gum for a bison year, pretty. My professors in Hell

are crawl space, lime, and lament. We tell fairy jokes over teacup saucers

marked American Whore to dizzying crowds of Johnny-Three-Leg hellions.

Ruby lapse in the tower bedroom, I draw horses from memory and ink

dovescript by devil’s taillight. The underworld orgies cream with horned

killers, the kinds I dreamed up sixty-nine hinds ago on sopped side-saddle.

Once I longed to be good. Now I am slippered, amok in a Glasgow grin,

unbundled and nosing the ethereal elements. What’s left of me—a peppered hand

half in you, arched as woebegone, nickel, botch. O Daddy, hell-mouth, cut a ribbon.

SELF-PORTRAIT EDGED IN MARABOU FEATHERS

Scratch paper fauns dream of one bright syringe to buckle them in sly oblivion.

“I think I will skip Hell, but read it to me,” you say in bed, breeding daffodils out of mud.

A mindless cold hooks our shanks on shallow bunts of angel’s food.

Possesed roans divine your woolen mind, where I live for a swallow’s year pocketing

loosies floated in bone broth. Dog knows we snort our dregs, a gloss with lips sewn up.

“Whatever you want of me is free,” I whinny, bent over the pink-mottled sink, loopy

striptease for muscled minks. Come morning, goring grapefruit we can’t get down.

Shudder, we cross the glass woods searching for cuckoo clocks wound on bearable myths.

Lovemongers cut in two by a cottage window.

Lie to me. We are blown and made ourselves again, dying to come home dark-haired.

Sleep, weasel walled up alive, it could be time. Journeys end in lovers meeting.

This is the call I’ve listened for all my life, the waltzing pinks and blues of boys bound

out of pocket in electric chairs. Nightmusic broods, blood bee porridges stain our book of dolls.

STRAITJACKET

Recluse gods lash as swans betray.

Before the blue door to easy living draped in flame, I knew a boy
once hung on a line: Cut a figure.

There, he’d moan it, curlicuing the walls with blood and pus
while the toaster coils roared, the bath drawn loosely.

And as I braided his mother’s hair with gingham, she’d soften to
her wristwatch, dulled by years, and mutter to herself: Heirloom.

Dalmatians bobbed in the burial case.