Osiris
What I liked about being sixteen
was that my whole body was an erogenous zone.
The mirage of starvation was all
over me, the stains of your eye paint
on my hipbones in wet
incandescent smears of lapis lazuli—
jackals could eat the flesh from my sides
and I would constantly be reborn.
It didn’t take your necrogenetic lips to raise me,
your perfect tongue.
The night cut open my mouth like an adze.
The wind spat perfume into my eyes.
My secret name punctured into bloom
(quicker than a greyhound and swifter than light).
But that body is only a thin mummy now,
dried and wrapped in old bandages,
and the one I’ve been using
would only lie on you to keep from limping.
I would run off you like steak blood from a cutting board,
dirty your sheets . . .
and you would keep replacing them with white,
pricking your hooded eyes into me
(latter-day whore of the Pharaohs),
busying yourself in the swamps
with the complications of my disassembly,
petitioning prehistorically indifferent crocodiles
with the episodes of your perdition.
If they lose all of me,
you will take a golden cock from your purse
and set it on my tomb,
so when you come mourning,
I can always keep it up for you,
commission the launch of your one-eyed godling
and your brutal 80 years of war
seduced from my dust.
You always had designs on an enthronement
that could fertilize your appetites.
What I liked about being sixteen
was that I could shiver with life inside you
(rain shocks in the pond growing),
then curl up like a tiny seahorse
in the Nile that flowed from your thighs
without any knowledge that
we spend the rest of our lives
building big enough graves.
Sitcom
Father is in his workshop in the garage
feeling very Black and Decker.
He’s whittling away at a thick branch
from the Backyard Tree of Life, crafting a magnificent phallus—
ever longer, ever longer it creeps out its albino
tentacle, too thin to bear the weight of its reaching,
a rubbery prop from a golden age sci-fi, fishing tackle
reflecting in the stage lights, the steam machine churning and burping
and someone just off camera yanks maniacally.
The hero dashes out in moon steps that resonate
through sawdust on a wood-planked floor,
plastic ray gun in one hand,
leggy chrome-pantied saucer trash in the other . . . .
The whir and rattle from the workshop, whir and
rattle, whir and rattle . . .
Father says to Son—my father before me,
his father before him . . .
Mother is twirling her executive ladle,
spinning salad, banging on every door
to call on them, to signify the changing of turn.
Her workshop is the world where the florescent lights
are as bright as the sun and no shadow
omens down into the crosshairs of the screw
stripped and scarred by the sightless push and throb
of the fitful twists of the head.
Her grackle hair is shedding on the furniture,
lies in piles in the bathroom, underneath the bed,
her dark wings are raining clean over the roof of the house
as they lift her by her scalp and drag her
shivering, a stone icon of Mary evacuated through the sky.
Mother says to Father—your beer is getting warm,
your food is getting cold . . .
Daughter is growing extra hands for the caduceus
and the gong, and she walks into every tunnel
with a miner’s light like a fatalistic eye in her forehead,
counting cars and trucks, lost sperm shooting through
the concrete gully.
She finds a flawed design
in the motion factories, and a sooty Neanderthal
from the age of shovel, coal, and steam,
asleep or broken, a wind-up ape in smiling blackface
with a rusted spring.
She shrills, “Wake up beast, but
don’t touch me! The efficiency expert is here.”
Daughter says to Mother—I’ve never been to the ocean . . .
Son is pining in his room, diddling his
computer keyboard like a kitten
searching for the yarnball’s soul.
His closets are spilled cornucopias
of digital tapes and discs and silvered dirigibles
of the information age containing
all the smutty images stolen from the tiger who died
in his meat.
The blip of the measuring machines
mounts and concocts a byline for his life,
adding up the burned out tears that,
through some atrocity of plumbing,
will get inside the ocean and drown the whales.
The camera on top the monitor films his treatise
again and again. It must be perfect—the thighmothers
of the world are seeking someone to cherish, someone culpable.
Son says—not me, but the I in me is not I . . .
Father says to Son—man equals meals.
Daughter says to Mother—woman equals woman?
Mother says to Father—man equals garage.
Son says to Family—light has fallen from my fob pockets
into the couch cracks, I cannot go on.
Audience awake!
Laughter. Laughter.
Kite
There is a kite on the moon, probably
in some crater, whose string I dropped a long
time ago. How do I know it’s there?
The string, week before last, began
to protrude from my ear, to tantal out
like a soft tent worm.
When I pulled at it I realized an end
was coming out my other ear as well, soaring
away upward out of sight.
Even on the moon there are breezes, but
not many. Each time the wind blows,
my head leans to one side
or the other.
Tomorrow I’m going to climb
up and up the string until I
reach my kite, then I’ll fly
down to earth beneath it blowing
kisses at stars as I float past,
taking wide bites from spongy clouds, and then
tangling myself into the top of a tree.
Soon, I’ll forget where I lost
myself. I won’t be able to see me from the ground.
Things go on in the tops of trees
where our eyes can’t go,
just as things go on in the earth
that toes can’t comprehend.
I would gladly go to either
place and just sit and see
what happens.
Ah . . . you must
do all this
when preparing a gift
for the weather.
A Mounting Song
Your name will be Sagging Pants Picking Icicles.
We release you from the Tribe, so go now
into your claptrap Gondwanaland.
Supercontinent of want—broken, adrift.
Déjà vu of the Everything Monstrous,
not recognized, not quite recognized . . .
yet florid with your preposterous epaulettes,
your extinction events and mighty dubiousness.
You will be a paradox among your frozen things—
thing that you are but cannot entirely inhabit.
You will not know, but you will roar,
and your roaring will become your knowing.
You will roar yourself through mootness
and moon-stanchioned glossolalia,
through glaciations of relinquishment
and the occupations of morticious brood lizards.
Roarer, perseverer, tousle-capped
with your tintinnabular twilit consciousness,
you will be the glut gargoyle
spouting off loutish plaints
from the swamped mortarboard heavens,
the nincompoop swain of Sheela-na-Gigs,
the ring-a-ling-linger of little lightnings.
Who will come to hear? Firebird will come to hear!
Firebird will build aeries in your belly pit
out of tar and flint stone.
He’ll sashay like an exploding peacock
among your collectables’ aisles’ neat symmetries,
shaking his bombardier ass,
molting his tail feathers in a lewd aurora
to incubate your drip-grown hatcheries.
Firebird boogies to your vandal evensong!
Your unpuckered troglodyte canticle!
Be stray! Go dissonant,
hooligan tongue
quailing out off key,
a cheap carpet unwoven in your dust-purge thumping,
as ice is only a cheap carpet of cold’s gimp weaving.
New Weaver, Fire Feather Weaver,
weaving your sexy paeans to gravitas as you galosh about
in your asbestos suspenders,
shake loose your Krishna hair!
Melt your muddy rivers
over the world’s huckstered hatbox,
over the closet cliffshelves,
down into the dream gutters,
down to that old La Brea umbrellaland,
mitten-ripe and moth-ballsy,
where tower tarts grow hairy for the harvest.
Don’t you know if he loves you?
He who hears all songs—
the Great Conflagrated Listener
who soars and dives at every rut of your incantations?
Bow to him, Sagging Pants,
on your old clay knees.
He’s your Loa, your jinn.
Come down from your boottips and your frostbit fingers
that reach into the icy arbors, and reach, and reach
for that perfect Tooth of Translucence.
Shout, “Here’s your chariot, creaking and snorting,
slathered in a slack gray hide!”
You bagpipe colossus
with pterodactyl wing ears,
all your strength concentrated into one brute long limb,
chimpanzee lipped,
and all your want, an ancient pelvic motion—
the upheaved earth slowly coming
to abide his rhythm.
And you will sing it like this:
I am a landslide, I am a storm!
I have dirtied your fastidious universe
with my horse-tongued kiss.
Who was more startled, you or me,
when I felt you ache to step into my hooves,
and prance?