holding out his hands and opening his mouth as if he’d ask a favor, and I thought it would be smart if we could all agree upon an answer. So I asked Earl about the answer, and Earl said Answer, and I asked Kim about the answer, and Kim said — and this was just before we learned the truth about the ribbon — Kim said: I don’t think that’s Josh.
Vince Neil Meets Josh in a Chinese Restaurant in Malibu (after Ezra Pound)
Back when my voice box
was a cabinet-full of golden vibrators, and my hair
fell white across the middle of my back
like a child’s wedding dress,
I made love to at least a dozen girls
dressed up to look like me: the hotel bed a sky
filled with the flock
of our south-flying mic scarves,
the back of my head and the front
appearing simultaneously
in hotel mirrors, and the twin crusts of our makeup
sliding off into satin
like bits of California coast. I heard my own lyrics
coming out of the tent
of their beautiful wigs, my lyrics driven back
toward me, poled into me, demanding of me
the willing completion of vague circus acts
I’d scribbled down, once, on the back of a golf card
or a piece of toilet paper. Sometimes I myself
wonder what I was thinking then, but those words
went on to live forever, didn’t they, radioed out
into the giant midwestern backseat
and blasted into kneecaps and tailbones
by that endless tongue of Berber carpeting
blanketing the American suburbs, boys and girls
strung like paper lanterns from here to Syracuse
along my microphone cord. Who rocks you now
rocks you always, I told them all,
and all of them somehow wearing
a homemade version of the same leather pants
I’d chosen to wear onstage that night;
all of them hoping to enter me — to enter anyone —
the way they thought I entered them,
and the way I entered them was wishing
I was somewhere else, or wishing I was
the someone else who’d come along
to enter me, which was the same thing. Love
in battle conditions requires a broad
taxonomy, queerness has its ever-more-visible degrees.
Josh, I know you know what I’m talking about,
you have the build of a stevedore. Which reminds me,
as a child in Nanjing,
I sculled the junks for my bread and I slept
in a hovel along the Chiang Jiang River.
I bred mice in a cage there who built their nests
from the frayed rope I’d taken from the decks, and one spring,
when the babies did not emerge, I lifted
up the rock that hid them, and I found
they’d grown together, fused with each other
and the tendrils of the nest. I held them up, eleven blind tomatoes
wriggling on a blackened vine. And now you come to me
in this Chinese restaurant in Malibu,
asking if you can help me. Please tell Circus Magazine I love them
truly, and please pass Pamela this message:
If you get back to Malibu by springtime, drop by the houseboat,
and I’ll rock your ass as far as Cho-fu-Sa.
Where the I Comes From
Our days often ended and began
with the sound of voices raised
in song. Even after we murdered
our friends and neighbors. Even
after we brought the attention
of our knives to the neighbors of
our neighbors, until at last
the neighborhoods fell silent
and the cities quiet and the city’s
city, the country then and next
the country, until finally the moon,
as if its own reflection, looked
upon an Earth that we had emptied
nearly back to Eden. Even then,
in that silence that seemed almost
a silence, sadly we were not
alone. All we ever wanted was
to be alone, to visit no one, to be
visited by nothing. But even after
we’d traveled to the nearby planets
and relieved them of their voices,
even after — and we all knew
this was coming — we fell amongst
each other, brother and sister,
until only I survived, still I heard it,
the universe subtracted of its skin
and hair, and yet the sound
of a voice, like someone singing
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