Silver vein'd and shaking through.
The night oppresses me with a speed relentless
and a sound constant: the insect hum, the air conditioned rattle.
And I drop myself and I tuck myself and I sleep myself
as best I can.
And her hushed song, her morning song, her routine song,
while she plucked herself white and shaved herself clean,
enters the sacred corridors of my sleep. And her face burns
into my mind. Something religious. She's a godhead,
one who exists with or without my permission. And I'd
sing along with her if it weren't for the sleeping. But I'm
diffusing all responsibility and I'm creeping toward the center
of that otherworld, where logic and time bow to her
and who am I?
so I bow too.
The days of my old life, the ones well lived, bleed in
and the regrets smooth themselves out and I dab at
her makeup with a wet napkin and I say this:

Do you have any idea how many times I've said
I love you to an empty room?

To be refleshed at the end of your last true summer,
to have fingertips—not your own—pry away the old
skin and charge the nerves of the new,
how could you plan something like that?
You're in a new body and in an old house.
The window unit moans. ***** clothes cover the floor.
He's more than fingertips now. He's uncombed hair.
He's shirtless and he's breath and he's in your mouth
and the taste is sweet, familiar, and just far enough away
to turn nameless and evaporate from where all names
originate: the tongue.

But he still delivers his tongue to you, your back arching,
you're a lost instrument singing, the notes bending, the
melody transforming, until God's refrain rings and ricochets
noiselessly in the chambers of your skull.
In space there is no center, you're always off to the side.

And he's there, at your side, and you both stare at the ceiling fan
and laugh. What else can you do? He is still. You are still.
He starts to say your name. No more words. We are home.

I buy a shirt, a blue shirt, a button down.
I drink a glass of wine, a red, a Malbec.
And I watch.
I stand still in the midst
of the St. Cloud Market.
The crowd—that singular being—
jostles and jockeys and talks
in broken English.
I chew gum, cinnamon gum, Nicorette.
I feel my habit inverting, bending, becoming mechanical.
And I must flirt and be moral
with the shopkeeper who looks a little
like me.
And I must revert to an irrational, emotional,
childlike state as I buy three pirated DVDs.

The crowd forms a circle instinctually.
Three women dance slowly in the center.
Paper falls from the sky, newsprint, a day old.

Gunfire, the sound of it, its slowing of time.
No one says a thing
and no one's feet make a sound and
every child is perfectly behaved
for one relentless moment.

It eats at me, this singular question. It repeats in my head, over and over—how can I desire what I already possess? I look at the books on my shelf and the coffee table, and I want to love them completely. I want to never buy another book. I look at the TV, a moderately sized HD set already obsolete, but what a fantastic machine it is, and though I've owned it for years, can I desire it? Or do I want something larger, something 4K? I'm trying to desire the objects I own, so when the day comes, when my singularity comes to an end, and I'm waiting for Her to come home, I will be lovesick, anxious, feverish, pure in my desire.

I've been in relationships and fantasized about one-off affairs. I've had one-off affairs and fantasized about something whole, something reliable.

This TV is watchable and this book is readable.

I think a woman is inherently better at desiring what's in her possession. She gives life, she creates, she's given to infrastructure, and future-building. A man destroys. A man conquers. A man stands in the corner of a room with a drink in his hand and recounts his destructions and conquests. You're a woman. Can you tell me how it's done?

Every true crime documentary resides in me.
Binge used to be tied to drinking. The language, I think,
is evolving, and I walk the black part of town at
night on a double dare from a lady poet whose
lexical purview lies somewhere between her
**** and the moon. I'm a beacon of fairness,
fair trade coffee stains my teeth, my lenin pants
imported from Bali are ethically made, and I speak
in a respectable and thoughtful half whisper
like the women of the QVC.
I return to the loft free of gunshot wounds
and love my lady poet thin and love my lady poet
tall and she says confusion is the only sustainable
state of being and I say I can agree with that and
she says she's been thinking about transitioning
and I say into more responsibility at work? and she
says haha no. Into a man.
And three weeks later I watch her read a poem
entitled "Traffic My **** Transgender *** to Heaven,"
she goes home with one, two, three Sylvia Plath lookalikes,
and I get swabbed at the doctors and I get prescribed
a moderate dose of Effexor and I speak in high school
Spanish to my office crush — she's from Venezuela, I think.
Power. Control. Stockings, I tell her, I have a thing for stockings
and pink cotton socks. One more drink and I'll hit my
groove. Chill. Power. Control. Put on that soul song I like.
Didn't I do it, baby?

My body's on the chair.
The balloon's tied to the lamp.
It wavers and spins. There's a smell,
I'll admit, and the flies have
already left and been.
The small world outside
continues, no need of my
permission. The bluebirds,
the children, the dozers—
I listen. No dreams,
no memories, no love,
no hate, no suffering,
no pleasure, no propagate.

I.

I lay beside the canals in Esmeralda, city of water.
For hours a shadow and an oar and a boat approach,
and in the distance unseen girls hum a melody,
a melody not wholly unlike the sound of the lapping waves.
The sun rises and sets in a matter of moments.
My skin crinkles, molts, regenerates as fresh
as a babe's. I think of father, of mother, the words
not the people. My hands move now on their own.
The left points to the Saint Cloud Bridge and I say,
Saint Cloud. I'm in my body but outside it. A little god.
A deliberate historian. I record everything.
I think I always did. My right hand waves
to an acrobat on a clothesline. Behind
the acrobat a small stucco home crumbles
and rebuilds itself. My right palm
covers my mouth and I kiss it.
The veins running down my arms
appear to be filled with different colored inks,
reds, blues, greens. A shadow and an oar and
a boat approach, closer, closer.
A single swallow flies above the water, dipping down,
wetting the tips of its wings, climbing upwards over the
balconies, the rooftops, the sun setting, the sun rising,
blessing its flight. My right hand traces my uneven
and ever shifting face. What did I look like as a boy?
Did I have many friends?

II.

The shadow offers his hand, eases me aboard
his small boat. We push off back the way he came.
He says a few words to me, the
only words exchanged on our long journey:
I used to live in the city, he says. It nearly
drove me mad. I moved to the country.
I cultivated a garden. I installed a wood stove.
This was healthy.

III.

A small delight, to watch the shadow
command the oar, the grace in it.
I think of a woman's dress. I think
of the word rustle. I feel the word rustle.
My left hand points to the shoreline.
Spanish moss hangs from a bald cypress.
I say the word, Fire, and the Spanish moss becomes
engulfed. I say, Stop, and everything
stops, even the sun. Its position makes
me think the phrase six o'clock. While
Esmeralda, the city entire, is locked
in my rule, I step out onto the water.
I find I can walk across it. I know the
city's name, but I'm not sure I ever lived
here. The blades of grass feel foreign
on the soles of my feet.

IV.

Four has always been my favorite number,
I think. A lightning bug emits a flash of green.
It is the only creature unstuck and I follow it.
It leads me through a snow covered valley,
through a yellowed wheat field, through
a suspended dust storm. I brush away the particles
and they drop to the cracked earth.
I'm in a desert now. A woman sits with her legs
crossed. I sit with her. I feel the urge to tell her
a joke. It's apparent. She feels the same urge.
We both try to get the words out, but we keep
laughing, our minds rushing to the punchline.
Before we finish our jokes, we die. We decompose.
We turn to skeletons, our bony mouths full of ash.
We're born again, our joy and humor now with a depth centuries old.
We laugh, death much easier than we'd expected.
We try to tell the jokes again. The cycle beings and ends and begins.
The lightning bug insists that we move on.

I'm led to a gate. Guarding the gate is a girl
with a red ribbon in her yellow hair.
I ask if I can call her maiden.

I can almost see through the girl.
Rolling hills and a crystal stream
serve as her backdrop just beyond
the gate. She summons me with
a gentle wave of her hand.
I lean down. She kisses me.

You're my first kiss, she says.

I hope I'm not your last.

She takes my hand and insists we walk backwards.
The ground is uneven, my feet unsure.

There's an old saying I'm sure you know, she says.
The definition of madness is doing the same thing
and expecting a different result. This applies to more
than recurring bad decisions. It applies to death.

What are you saying? I've been expecting a different death?

You've been expecting a different consequence of death,
but you keep dying the same way, the girl says. Watch me.
Be curious. But say no more. Don't diffuse death of its
wild alchemy.

We walk backwards through the gate.
I want a secret, something
the girl doesn't know about me, one
dark moment to add dimension. But
the thought lurks that she knows
more about me than me. Time speeds
up. Day turns to night. Snow feathers
down. Backwards we walk into empty
homes, into dry riverbeds, into the unknown.
We begin to fall. From what, I'm not sure.
To where, I'm not sure.
The girl grips my hand tightly.

When will I know that I've died?

Shhh, she says. No words. Only wonder.