recited his exploits and cutting-edge features,
all the arts and countries he was lord of.
He was wasted, I think. He walked on the table.
He said his voltage was so out of control.
He said, Relax, what you’re feeling is
the great experiences are generic:
when they happen to you they do not happen to you.
To take the god was to lose the man.
To take the man was to die of the god.
Either might turn me into stone.
I got up For a refill
from the Heliconian well,
and texted from the parking structure
Hadda go…
III. Pygmalion among the Young
He could tell from their pistol shots of laughter,
their bucking and surging
like someone learning to drive stick,
their pretense and collapse,
their talking on two cells at once,
how they down strange solvents,
their voices sax-raw or helium-high,
how they take each other harshly,
grinding together like stones,
grinding alone like stones, that the young
have statues in them, tall white statues
they must dance out, drink to sleep, outspeed.
Like a finger moving under a line of type—
O god, slower than that—
their future comes, the party they’re late for
where people are saying incredible shit about them
that they have to get to, and say, and say
like how it really is, so they pile in and floor it
till their backs stiffen and their faces change in the wind.
IV. Twilight of a God
That girl who drank from her hands
huge wastes of wine,
and his awe,
was it? So that he surfaced,
his head in a little clear spot above the music
and a good bet was
that whatever happened next
wasn’t going to happen to him.
Suddenly he wasn’t the minor deity,
coat still on, in the corner booth,
smiling benevolently upon his children,
but a guy walking out, head down,
into the cold of an outer borough,
the signs unreadable, the age of Changes over.
Though aren’t those still his angels
at the gold bar of Heaven
who lift glass trumpets to their lips?
V. Orpheus at Last Call
One of those dreams: you struggle and fail
for years
to dial a number, read a page, remember
not to look back…
(her hand confused in mine, soft struggle of a bird)
I’ve drunk so much
it rises in me: something like soft roots
parts softly
and my head sweeps down the singing river singing…
VI. Apollo in Age
Spring,
I am no good with pain.
Stop,
I’ll tell you anything.
Zeus: A Press Conference
Eons we rule in our tall pale closets
and all your talk is the few failures of distance
even a man can read, in Ovid, in a few hours:
brute swan, tsunami of gold, bull
sliding the girl shark-swift into open sea.
The robe drops, the sun widens to half the sky,
the tachycardic certainty of death…
So similar the stories, maybe all one.
Whereas a god, on a million channels,
is all thoughts always. Once a millennium, maybe,
in his whited-out daydream he meets dark eyes
and is rapt into an endless morning after:
one man, one thought, one cup of coffee
for what, to a god, feels like a millennium.
You vultures, if you have to write, write
this: the humiliation of a human story
no god, with all Time, has the time to live,
or even read to the end. No questions.
State-Sponsored
Oh dear, say the Tyrants, sex
is naughty and intense
and might save you.
