he wished to be sodomized by thieves.
Your wife comes from a family of thieves.
Her mother taught her never to confuse
sex with the doing of one’s taxes. I’ll get
to her father later. Her father is a series
of furnaces. About your wife’s novel I wrote,
Friends, this is the worst birthday party, ever.
She took it as a compliment. Love, kill,
betray, deify, vote for, nap with, or bury alive?
II
She changed her telephone number.
She doesn’t have any birds inside of her.
Her idea becomes flesh by early afternoon.
When I first read your wife’s new memoir,
Sir, it felt like watching the lighthouse
go dark, like doing inventory, finding one
planet missing. No doubt your wife knows
very well which planet. I look forward to
your next dinner party, where I may sample
from the catered board, ask your wife
about said memoir. Last time I read it, I awoke
to find myself burning heretics. I guess
what it is, is that probably your wife puts
her allotted birds inside of other people.
III
Your wife’s police are a very special
kind of police. They fingereth the apple
of mine eye, and there are way too many
testicles to count. Likewise, this is a strange-
looking bed. And this is a magic handkerchief.
You wish it were eighteen horseflies. You wish
your wife’s police were far more brutal. Me,
I never bought the premise that your wife
was ever a girl, but if I did, I wouldn’t
take it personally. I’m not a nest of living
wig-hair, nor baby-bits, nor eighteen flies pouring
from the mouth of whoever’s hiding in this
weird new bed with me. Come out, Inflatabilium.
Don’t make me call your wife’s police.
Vince Neil Accompanies Josh to Luncheon with Scholars, Poets, and Others — Gets Cell Phone Number of Grad Student Sitting at Far End of Table — Orders Cheeseburger, No Tomato — Borrows Josh’s Cell Phone — Calls Grad Student Sitting at Far End of Table
If I’d been born a girl, like you,
I wouldn’t have lived any longer than I will,
and whether I’d be waiting
in my new long johns, or in the plus-size version
of your blouse and Target pumps,
still the ancient Boy Scout Death would sidle up
and find me in the houseboat,
compliment my penmanship, my knots, and then
he’d lead me to the minivan, never to be seen
with this hairstyle again, the handsome scalp
and blond fringe now worn
by seagulls, who hit the high notes like it was nothing,
who think in unison, though they never
seem to fly that way, instead go dropping singular
from the squiggled flock
after bread crust and fish eye, blip-blip
down from the sky, rogue threads of EKG. I mean to say
what’s globbed is globbed for good
and even John Keats will not unfuck it for us.
Though maybe you have this feeling
about me — good! — and maybe then
you paste that feeling down with words
and I do the same, and then dreaming in our beds
we get the lonely message from each other,
just in time, just as the jackbooted soldiers
come rushing in, over the picket fence, with every fourth beat
of the fearful heart gone pulsing out its tracer bullet
into a potholed DMZ of sky — I’m not sure
what your dreams are like — the moon
now a cross section of bludgeoned tomato
over the schoolhouse, and now a white pants button
lost on the highway asphalt. Learning is strictly
for girls, the guns still going chop-chop-chop,
and John Keats, in those remaining years,
he kept sending up his test obituaries
like weather balloons, poems still floating even now
over Tulsa and the like, their comely
bivalve pentameter interfering
with radio signals, just the reverse
of the way a beautiful, living body
can scan so vibrantly it zones out
all the ghost code, can get between me
and the important messages
I should be getting from the underworld,
one code for another, the dead only interfering
with the
