Shake the demon lover
in the effulgent post-Chelyabinsk world,
where death breathes you back
into yourself and backwards you walk
through those coupled images, so posed,
charged with feigned desire,
the lighting just right,
the angle meticulous,
smushing foreheads with golden rings
on your fingers.
You had a dog.
You had a crockpot.
A kid was on the way.
Shake the demon lover,
rip yourself from her arts district loft,
where the music is in French and always beautiful,
glide down the rusted rails,
cruise past the headshops, the pawnshops,
say the word Tuesday and wonder if it means anything
other than the third day of the week.
You shared a bed.
You shared a bed.
You shared a bed.
Shake the demon lover
and her words track you,
her text reads,
"Come over, friend."
And she calls you friend,
she shouts you friend,
she pants you friend,
as you end the affair for
the sixth, seventh, eighth
time, one last couch
**** and never speak
to me again.

Have you been to the mountain?
No no no. But
I've been under the bridge, Mr. Jones.
I've washed my feet in Cottonwood Creek.
I've named the meadowlarks after ex-girlfriends.
Suzanne. Isis. Mel-oh-dee.
Some mornings I woke up in places I'd never
been and on those mornings,
oh I woulda killed for a pen.
The fog and the
steady gasp of diesels
surrounded me and sang sang sang.
Tall grass along the interstate
and god, he didn't talk to me,
but I pretended to be god and talked
to myself, saying This way. This way.
This way to the promised land.
On what I thought to be
the Fourth of July, mud dried
around my knees in the Quapaw,
and I stood up for four days straight before
the rains came.
And finally, in the golden dawn,
I arrived at my childhood home.
Ivy on the chimney. Rusted trike in the overgrown lawn.
My father sat in his chair. Static on the TV.
He said, "Haven't done yourself in yet?"
My mother, in cobwebs and rags said, "He's got
one classic in him, one heartbreaking work
of genius before he goes."
And I asked her for a title.
She only pointed.
I turned and that's when I saw her,
the Girl at the Gate.

A breakdown? I don't know if I'd call it that. Something about that word connotes immediacy, precision, a kind of instantaneous loss of your mental faculties. No. This has been slow. Like two, three years slow. I'd welcome a breakdown. A breakdown would give me the chance to start over, to mend, to be a better ******* human being. This degradation, and, I know, I'm being repetitive here, this degradation is so slow it's almost intangible. It's so slow there's ample room for denial. I need one swift, irrefutable act of self-destruction. Don't do that. That little gesture, that go-on-just-bottom-out hand flip. You're not listening. I don't have the energy for that. I'm not reckless. Wanting and being are, in this case, mutually exclusive. You know where I am? Let me illustrate it for you. I say I love you to empty rooms. I say sweetheart, sweetie, et cetera for no other reason than habit being so strong.  I'm not beat up about her leaving. It happens. Sometimes two people just don't work, you know? But maybe I'm beat up. I haven't slept in the bed. I sleep on the couch like she used to. I buy her favorite wine—which I don't particularly enjoy—but I drink it. I drink it, I think, just to watch the bottle go empty. I drink the wine and I sleep on the couch hoping it summons the breakdown, some ******* finality. That's true. I've been many different people, but I've been the same one for far too long.

I shed everything but
the pencil skirt and stockings.
I suffocate and sundry and
drift into my boy's case of
suede leather, where he
trusts me to miscalculate
his competence and its
Saturday, the morning,
and he says, I love you
in the morning, Sarah.
There's stroke and nip,
at every turn of the trail
an adoration for what
he calls my soul, and
he asks for the routine
obliteration. A violence
always whispered.
I'm velvet everything.
Velvet tongued.
Velvet *****'d.
Each portal and contour
a soft place for him to
land, to dispose of his
fear of death,
but what am I supposed to
do with it, the fear of death?
But this is my burden
with the light skipping
through the blinds. Simpler
times, there were, I think.
And a last name he means
to hang on me, always soon
and very soon. Dishes in the sink.
Eternal moonbeams and sun rays.
This is it, I'm afraid.

Here in the west borough, down three or four blocks from the epicenter, the shocks come to you in tides — little, electric, delightful in some alien way. Even the sounds of instant decay ring pleasant. The concrete, the bricks, the mortar, the Corinthian columns, the suspended ceiling tiles, the florescent bulbs, the coffee cups, the desktops, the family portraits all fall from their stations, screaming toward the cool pavement. It’s a temperate Thursday in January and the weathermen continue to talk in stunted disbelief. A car catches fire on Malcom X Boulevard, and weather is the wrong word, you think, for this phenomenon. It’s rage. It’s bitter. The violence of the sun-catching glass smacks of vengeance and this whole thing is man-made or, at the very least, god-made but not anything so indiscriminate as weather.

There’s still the pleasure of it though. The collapse of the old world. And there’s nothing but rubble on the corner of 9th and Dominican, and for the life of you, you can’t remember what stood there before. In your evergreen bones you know one thing: whatever anodyne brick institution reigned will be replaced by that glorious glass and that glorious steel, 100 towers impaling the sky. The future is now. A tremor. A cloud of dust.

For about ten seconds the windshield is worthless yet you speed up, hurling yourself through the fog of destruction into a **** world, feeling essential and brilliant and and and.

How many times and on how many screens has JFK been assassinated? she asks a few minutes into the commute.

Someone has said that to me before, I say.

And I notice, now for the first time, even she is a rerun or a ghost
or an unfortunate reminder of the one who came before her,
from the artfully mismatched polish on her toenails to the way her wrists wrap around each other as she talks her quiet talk, her fingertips balancing her iPhone, which streams Jackie Then Kennedy scrambling toward the back of the Cadillac. Its the Zapruder footage in slow motion and somehow in HD, and she touches the thumbs up icon when the footage comes to a close.

Across from me sits a dead man. I'm sure of it—his death. He lounges in himself, his belly fat imperialistic in its expanse, moving beyond beltline and claiming a space all its own on the torn, blue cushioned seat. The dead man looks a bit like Marlon Brando, post-Tango in Paris, when the depression set in and with it the weight, but like Brando, there's still a cool magic in the deep lines of the dead man's forehead, something forlorn and knowing in the drag of his eyelids.

It's here that I remember I'm a writer. And moments like these, I'm supposed to render in belabored yet fragmented ways.

That's ego, she says, not looking up from her phone.

What's that? I say.

The way you pigeonhole me. Rerun, ghost, et cetera, she says. Maybe I've made love to a sad man like you before. Maybe you're a trigger for me. Maybe I know everyone you're going to be, everything you're going to say.  Like I was going to tell you these pants, these pants are lenin pants and I got them from Bali. And I didn't say it because I already knew your response.

Are they ethically made? we say smugly and simultaneously.

And the subway car does that screeching sound you hear in movies and the tunnels outside do that motion blur you see in movies and I try to kiss her but she says that uh-uh cowboy line you know from movies.

Brando had affairs, I say.

Kennedy had affairs, she says.

Have you ever had an affair?

It was exhausting, she says, the performance required. All the effort in your vocal affectations, those terrible 3 p.m. lunches, the pet names, your obligatory passion and one-liners, the secrecy for the sake of secrecy, the purchase and disposal of lingerie. If I could get the time back—

I'd spend it alone with a glass of red wine and a good book, we say.

The slam poet in cords, in denim,
rambles from neon beer haven
to flybuzz brothel, cracking quiet
jokes about soup to shiny junebugs
in the relentless moonlight.
One hundred dollars in thirty-five bills
slowly retreat from wallet
toward water-cut whiskey.
He’s got a chapbook widely
available at frozen yogurt shops
across the metro; he’s got a
tour in the works, tri-county,
every middle school from
Shawnee to Seminole; he’s
got a collection of ex-girlfriends,
made up almost entirely of wizened lesbians;
he’s got an MFA from UNC Wilmington,
and he shouts this more than speaks this
from his treacherous barstool to the sleepy bartender.
One of the girls, she takes him upstairs,
and to her he says, Your freckles—islands
in the sea of your milk-white skin.

The night passes, warehouses are razed,
and he watches the loft apartments emerge.
The food trucks come. He parks beside them,
typing poems made to order out of his trunk. The
money flows in, crumpled and sweaty and
in one-dollar denominations. The Old Fashions
transfigure into Old English. And in his pocket
thesaurus he looks for a word. It’s not vagrant,
nor vagabond. It’s not homeless, nor wayward.
He lies in the long shadow of a Midwestern sunset,
starved and shaking. Up from the blackened
city shrubs comes an indifferent breeze and
just as he thinks the word Pauper, he dies one
on the corner of 23rd and Western.