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I can only give you back what you imagine. I am a soulless man. When I take you into my mouth, it is not my mouth. It is an unlit pit, an aperture opened just enough in the pinhole camera to capture the shade. I have caused you to rise up to me, and I have watched as you rose and waned. Our times together have been innumerable. Still, like a Capistrano swallow, you come back. You understand: I understand you. Understand each jiggle and tug. Your pudgy, mercurial wad. I am simply a hand inexhaustible as yours could never be. You’re nevertheless prepared to shoot. If I could I’d finish you. Be more than just your rag.

When we talk about when to tell the kids, we are so together, so concentrated. I mutter, “I feel like a killer.” “I’m the killer”—taking my wrist—he says, holding it. He is sitting on the couch, the old indigo chintz around him, rich as a night sea with jellies, I am sitting on the floor. I look up at him, as if within some chamber of matedness, some dust I carry around me. Tonight, to breathe its Magellanic field is less painful, maybe because he is drinking a wine grown where I was born—fog, eucalyptus, sempervirens—and I’m sharing the glass with him. “Don’t catch my cold,” he says, “—oh that’s right, you want to catch my cold.” I should not have told him that, I tell him I will try to fall out of love with him, but I feel I will love him all my life. He says he loves me as the mother of our children, and new troupes of tears mount to the acrobat platforms of my ducts and do their burning leaps. Some of them jump straight sideways, and, for a moment, I imagine a flurry of tears like a whirra of knives thrown at a figure, to outline it—a heart’s spurt of rage. It glitters, in my vision, I nod to it, it is my hope.

Water nymph, you have climbed from the shallows to don your dragon-colors. Perched on a reed stem all night, shedding your skin, you dry your wings in moonlight. Night melts into day. Swift birds wait to snap you up. Fly, dragonfly! Fly!

O hideous little bat, the size of snot, With polyhedral eye and shabby clothes, To populate the stinking cat you walk The promontory of the dead man’s nose, Climb with the fine leg of a Duncan-Phyfe The smoking mountains of my food And in a comic mood In mid-air take to bed a wife. Riding and riding with your filth of hair On gluey foot or wing, forever coy, Hot from the compost and green sweet decay, Sounding your buzzer like an urchin toy— You dot all whiteness with diminutive stool, In the tight belly of the dead Burrow with hungry head And inlay maggots like a jewel. At your approach the great horse stomps and paws Bringing the hurricane of his heavy tail; Shod in disease you dare to kiss my hand Which sweeps against you like an angry flail; Still you return, return, trusting your wing To draw you from the hunter’s reach That learns to kill to teach Disorder to the tinier thing. My peace is your disaster. For your death Children like spiders cup their pretty hands And wives resort to chemistry of war. In fens of sticky paper and quicksands You glue yourself to death. Where you are stuck You struggle hideously and beg, You amputate your leg Imbedded in the amber muck. But I, a man, must swat you with my hate, Slap you across the air and crush your flight, Must mangle with my shoe and smear your blood, Expose your little guts pasty and white, Knock your head sidewise like a drunkard’s hat, Pin your wings under like a crow’s, Tear off your flimsy clothes And beat you as one beats a rat. Then like Gargantua I stride among The corpses strewn like raisins in the dust, The broken bodies of the narrow dead That catch the throat with fingers of disgust. I sweep. One gyrates like a top and falls And stunned, stone blind, and deaf Buzzes its frightful F And dies between three cannibals.

Where we almost, nay more than married are. —John Donne Pearl egg of fly intimates the curve of larva, its spine and claw point. The cellophane shell, brittle pupa blanket where the almost fly lies like a spring. Coiled and tensile, its exertions will tear the sheet. Six black legs flutter against the dry christening gown, I see his lambent eyes cloistered in these living walls of jet. Small glider, his veined wings are sheer parasols, gauzy skirts that admit the light. The orange down of his pelvis beneath this architecture, blood is the adhesive fastening flight, my sleek aviator presses his sucker feet to my lips. How little he denies me, the drone in my ear and he swarms my heart if one two light steps from the tips of my fingers he bows his head and makes a violin, or hovers behind me when I circle the floor, lonely, he rests on shoulder, elbow, to stare at me with swollen eyes, darkling, drop of ink. A currant in the sugar dish, he models in the painted flowers, black eye of Susan, blunt thorn—he delights in my decadence, the slippery floor, tiles, and stairs haunted with illness: my sensual life and his intersect. He comes on the wing of another spring, in slicks of grey water, the pendant sun. to navigate what is unknown to me, patiently, he regards the chrysalis of skin that envelops the arched veins. Incurious and constant, he is used to waiting for the modest blush, the rustle of disrobing the hush. Of silks unfolding, of gossamer veils drawn as tenderly as breath, from the fluent sea of one blood made of two, the sweetness of his pestilent kiss.

(for Niyi Osundare) Something in altitude kindles power-thirst Mere horse-height suffices the emir Bestowing from rich folds of prodigious turban Upon crawling peasants in the dust Rare imperceptible nods enwrapped In princely boredom. I too have known A parching of that primordial palate, A quickening to manifest life Of a long recessive appetite. Though strapped and manacled That day I commanded from the pinnacle Of a three-tiered world a bridge befitting The proud deranged deity I had become. A magic rug of rushing clouds Billowed and rubbed its white softness Like practiced houri fingers on my sole And through filters of its gauzy fabric Revealed wonders of a metropolis Magic-struck to fairyland proportions. By different adjustments of vision I caused the clouds to float Over a stilled landscape, over towers And masts and smoke-plumed chimneys; Or turned the very earth, unleashed From itself, a roaming fugitive Beneath a constant sky. Then came A sudden brightness over the world, A rare winter’s smile it was, and printed On my cloud carpet a black cross Set in an orb of rainbows. To which Splendid nativity came–who else would come But gray unsporting Reason, faithless Pedant offering a bald refractory annunciation? But oh what beauty! What speed! A chariot of night in panic flight From Our Royal Proclamation of the rites Of day! And riding out Our procession Of fantasy We slaked an ancient Vestigial greed shriveled by ages of dormancy Till the eyes exhausted by glorious pageantries Returned to rest on that puny Legend of the life jacket stowed away Of all places under my seat. Now I think I know why gods Are so partial to heights—to mountain Tops and spires, to proud iroko trees And thorn-guarded holy bombax, Why petty household divinities Will sooner perch on a rude board Strung precariously from brittle rafters Of a thatched roof than sit squarely On safe earth.

Down milk-bright colonnades the leper’s bell recedes. Shades lowered against the gleaming waste of ice, I sit back, bathe in lukewarm acquiescence. Dutiful, prompt, strapped, doped, a little drunk, squinting at international afternoon I’ll soon pass GO again. And if these colored pencils, nose drops, passport should plummet with the rest of the huge oval, giant time capsule soft for the shark’s maw, will a notebook ambered back to front with words rescue me from oblivion? Syrup of skittish travelers, fame. I yawn.

Focus on the shapes.Cirrus, a curl, stratus, a layer,cumulus, a heap. Humilis, a small cloud, cumulus humilis, a fine day to fly. Incus, the anvil, stay grounded. Nimbus, rain, be careful, don’t take off near nimbostratus, a shapeless layer of  rain, hail, ice, or snow. Ice weighs on the blades of  your propeller, weighs on the entering edge of your wings. Read a cloud, decode it, a dense, chilly mass can shift, flood with light. Watch for clouds closing under you, the sky opens in a breath, shuts in a heartbeat.

Photograph found in the road: bejeweled hand gripping a limp dick. All parties suffering from lack of ambition. The hills of Tuscany won’t dapple with sunlight, and here it is nearly noon. She didn’t much want the leather jacket, the vendor didn’t really care to sell it, she hardly tried it on, he barely praised her beauty, then everyone wasn’t hungry and went to lunch. The rubies won’t glow. The delayed train shrugs on its siding. The penis appears at ease. Osteria, osteria, osteria, osteria. I knew many words but preferred to say the same ones over and over, like a photographer shooting four frames of the same subject, hoping for one in focus. This clearly among the other three.

Like bodiless water passing in a sigh, Thro’ palsied streets the fatal shadows flow, And in their sharp disastrous undertow Suck in the morning sun, and all the sky. The towery vista sinks upon the eye, As if it heard the Hebrew bugles blow, Black and dissolved; nor could the founders know How what was built so bright should daily die. Thy mood with man’s is broken and blent in, City of Stains! And ache of thought doth drown The primitive light in which thy life began; Great as thy dole is, smirchèd with his sin, Greater and elder yet the love of man Full in thy look, tho’ the dark visor’s down.