You of the untamed *** appeal and soul appeal of a true Renaissance man
So called because each time your fingers brush mine
My night sky is Reborn for the ten thousandth time
Every star more vibrant than before
Blushing on my behalf because my cheeks stained red long ago
This is the image – the only knowledge of you I have kept:
Trifling contact with genius
Yet – and yet – every season’s constellations grin down
On nights of wisp, whimsy, and Absolute Solitude
Showing only this image
And nights are quite darker without the Rebirth that you taught me could be
Well I suppose –
There is one other celestial tease
One where your club thumbs brush not tips, but lips
To draw back the curtain withholding all of the awe you instill
“It has been so many days since we last touched,
And my hair has grown longer ever since.”
(Keeping the exact number as my own)
It is then with horror that I watch my thoughts
The Questions I have always longed but never dared to ask you
Scatter on batwings
Startled by the oceanlight in your eyes
Even when I search for the things I had already told you
In all number of back road hallucinations
Those too have left
So all that remains and escapes through my barren mouth
Is that muted cry of stagnant love

Late morning after dreaming of these
hand-written Alaskan three-dollar bills
Polaroid photographs of empty silver screens
hidden elevator button escape routes
mid-performance ****** reconstructions
I half-wake from my half-sleep and in seventy-five-cent consciousness
beg the man of my waking misconceptions to meet for one more
one more double latte Marlboro 27 kiss behind the parking lot than we’d ever had
before we part again and he will reunite with his lunchmeat of holiday hopes and aspirations
And I will return to
the land of brotherless love and flaming heterosexuals
the land of ugly **** and self-righteous queers
the land where there is no God because I chased him from the West before he could do me harm
the land filled with my pity and inebriated mindless self-perpetuation
the land consumed with no passion because the Yukon’s landscape eyes are bleak and empty
the land where the only direction is floating down-river to the blood-stained rocks of our maturity
still within my mental prison with my other mental inmates and mental shanks and *****
I dream again with my eyes wide open and lips drawn in two-tier lonely grimace
dream of the blue green red-eyed beauty that I have never known

I wish I could but am grateful I cannot
find the perfect word in my dirt-edged dictionary to describe this feeling
because all is not perfect.

I have lived and relived one hundred moves and counter-moves
not knowing black from white, simply wanting to need
to trap your affections beneath rock or steel as fits my schemes.
One hundred moves for every star in the sky of each wilting night,
and in the midst of a single breath –

a breath like one I swear we’ve shared
on couch or on fencepost in awkward happenstance

– this mind of mine manipulates
  all inadequate allegory, all incomplete comparison
  trying to condense into a single sentiment
  the breadth of that which my chest can rarely contain
and disposes of each in turn.

For words,
the countless words I know by sight and by sound,
would rather not comply.
If only they'd meet the demands of such a meager man,
this torment, this voiceless howl
calling me to blissless inaction
could find solace in this feeling.

They claim and they have said
over again for the misty-eared among us:
Love bears all things.
Yet the beast inside contests:
Bears love all things.
For this is not Love but an Eternal beast
a beast, a Bear, which thrives regardless
of my pain or pleasure
– striking out from the rotting memory of your chiseled touch.

sun and moon stand side-by-side in the great starless sky of this Monday Sunday Tuesday workweek
with ambulance stoplight caution I leap from crevice to crack of the ***** cement walkways that tear across snowy fields
staring at the world around me - faces as solemn unreserved apathetic mirrors of nothing in their corresponding souls
pair them off in dialogues of the triumphs of the fabled GPA - its deep-throat growling dripping fangs embedded in their minds since sloppy second-hand birth
and I cry out and I cry alone for these are the summers winters springs falls etc and so on of my discontent
for I am a man among gods
gods of capitalism and communism  and social disorder and bureaucracy
gods of music and poetry and written spoken words and fashionability
and the only false evidence of such godly aspirations remain on my body as fading bitemarks on my wrists from when once I tried so valiantly to tear my technicolor blood from these incontinent arms
but even in such times as those there was no salvation but for yellow-staining death sticks clutched between shaking fingers and melting shots fired down raw fleshy throat in rapid secession
the gods I hold so dear have left me for whatever come what may in these places of my mind filled with words and thoughts and images of your everything thrashing against nothing

standing shaking shivering cold among the ice and a thousand burnt-out cigarettes
I make eye contact with the waning moon and we share a fatal thought
and as I partake in the 1:19 prayer service of the hopeful
I whisper the sonnets of human experience with each dragon’s breath
so once more in this biting air with my natural striped gloves and leather-laced boots
Here’s to life and here’s to death.
Here’s to us stuck painfully between.
May we never walk on asphalt painted roads.
May the world pass us by as just another tree.
and as I crush yellow nicotine filters with the greatest brevity I pause
Here’s to you.
May you some day find my heart among your refuse.

projects and projections from one mind one body one soul
painfully euphorically to the next in full-circle sunset
resting, waiting to be eaten up up and away into Oblivion
(give me an O, give me a B, give me an L, **** it, let’s get high)
not knowing – never knowing – couldn’t bear to know
within a cycle of parties and pills and pain
new philosophies would erupt from wrist and elbow
because we should have Let It Be
because we couldn’t have Let It Be
because because because because because of the wonderful things we’ve done
and the laws we’ve yet to break, the palms we’ve yet to trace
and the things we’ve yet to burn
but in exodus our torches lost their flame
so one by one we light our hands
****** burning flesh between the trees
and stumble toward the long-set sun