PATHETIC ODE

What’s it take, to score a little victory?
Debased and bedridden by Sick
that citrine fiend.

In the gelatin of glands.

In the quivering flesh of my country
hole-punched with steel and lead

poisoned and bravado-ing

all over the damn place face
gaunt with pathogenic kissfist.

My sensitive openings in recoil
at ambivalence in

relentless asexual reproduction.

There’s cake in the icebox.

There’s fire in the ditch licking the dead.
Sweating with pangs of Sick, again.

I’m sorry for the failure of my throat box
sallow and ridged like condom tossed
I am sorry for the fever of my pride.

Sick becomes a letter

left slickened on the table
from saliva and spite.

Hysterical immune response to foreign object.
Hystamine, swollen ample goddess.

Your smile is infectious.

Isolate the contaminant.

Isolate the waifish androgyne
from her clinging.

I love you but I don’t like you.

I love you but it makes me sick.

a greeting card slipped under the door, get better soon.

Humiliated by adoration
that ferments into loathing
then sleep.

Victory in anesthetic

in pit of silence, mouth seized
with sugar. Mouth seized with

mentholated balm of love. Embalming hand.

A little vitality? My Sick is trying to break itself into
a little togetherness, again.


VALENTINE

Barber asks me
Where do you see God?
Rubs my head
with menthol,
my scalp a rash
of rotting things
and valentines.

Death possé gathering
like whitebloodcells
when Ari’s mom
dies. I am the escort–
thru airport
and convulsion.
Hapless ferryman.

They’ve never looked
more boy, dolled
down in army green.
Face slack
slackening
seizing.

Our plane flies on the lip
of a big cup
of sunset.
Thick light shining
on stomachrocking grief
Red. cutting. beam, stunning

I rub oil into
their scalp and
androgynous
giving
hands. Ari swallows,
“I want to live I want to live but not without her”

I hold them onto
the tarmac and
onto the train
and out of my arms–
magnificent
in their ability to ask
to be held. (I can’t
do
that.)

A feeling up the cords of me
like seasicksoulmate
Valentine.

Where do I see God?

I’m trying to say that I eat my friends.
Absorb like salt, osmosis, taking
the wafer and all that.

16 on a school trip
a cliff above the sea
Ari was out in the brush gathering
a girl in the midst of nervous break.
When they came back
shivering to the bunks (dawn)
I sucked their fingers like ice.
Like anything.

And it’s so easy to
take you into my mouth
into my blood.

Baptist barber asks me as he
buffs the death off my head.

Soaked eyes like
hot puppies pools
of flashing oil
God. Oh
god, fuck
me. God.

So many valentines
strobing
menthol
making all of me
prickle and sing.

I am sorry for this animal love.
Visceral. Dangerous. Wet.
Where do I see God? Ha.

In the hand in my mouth
in the death in my blood. In you
of course, in you.

ORGANDANCE

My cat arranges the unwanted artifacts

of a rat outside my door: head; intestines; tail;

I want to be butchered into regions.
Disembodied pussy

throbbing like a heart, placed next to
my sweetbreads and a severed hand
gleaming with rings.

But instead I am put to bed like a child.
With a puppy lick

that leaves me dizzier

than demolition.

thunder never comes
thunder never comes
thunder never comes

Your good intentions wash me

from the inside, traveling up
(by proxy of) your dick and fingertips.
All the way through my belly

to my soul(letting)

the walls of which are thick

with ectoplasm.

I laugh as ghosts flow out

riding my orgasm

and you have no idea

how your lovemaking has restored me
and how I resent you for it, as I cling
to the fading talisman of my insolence.
So fuck you. Fuck me.

Thanks a bunch. And all that.

Thunder never comes
no matter how I ache.
Neither does the ax.