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korea might be gay but I do not think you are. korea is a peninsula. you and I are people meaning that we have hair we comb and things to look at. our lips pout and take on the fullness of an adopted meaning. the fact of the matter is that relentlessness is a hand- shake, a limp fish or glass of lukewarm tea. the fact of the matter is that standing on a stage everything is comic, meaning small and memorable, of the insubstan- tial "universe," a minor disaster or floating chord. the darkness is outside when I see you, not in. I laugh when the funny thing gets said, and mostly I laugh inside. on the inside is without curves and artifi- cial spaces, many of them not gay or korea. but when I see you they all run and speech is maybe stammer, sometimes slur. margaret cho, your tongue might wreak more havoc than in speaks, outside being from the vantage point of escalating stairs, from dark glasses and escapades. the vantage being from a great height, a lighter space on the inside that was formerly before the dark and laugh. we really wait for the funny things before they are said and let go for ever after. margaret, there are many funny sisters and there are many porn stores. I too think woo lae ok is really petri- fied of its own fish. that there are babies and there are dykes, that this little piggy has something, that a pubic mound transforms into a public space, not being gay or with outstanding curves, prayerful and abashed, facing the tide, grown over, rediscovered in the woods by strangers and haunted for years and years.

we aren't differentiable with bangs and hooded lids. I know the likeness doesn't stop right there. what's so great about being horny? the joke is insatiable. it rips and roars between and through. we both have found our mother's jewels. buried in closets, rolled in silk thread and bunting. done in scarlet, fortunately found, never for the men in sharing. these are our secrets. our punch lines and couplets. I went to bed thinking "pixies." the bliss and after- math of a spiritual kiss. how you resonate without rooms, maintaining perfect valences. where is the disaster at the end of this dread? in my dream state you were queen, a reigning bodhisattva without a sprig. I climbed inside your belly. punched inside you laughed and laughed, converting persimmons into a freedom jelly. Slathered all over, I found us exuberant, happy to swing or go both ways.

I saw your picture in the 79th street station. You said you’d be interested in any comments I might have on the condition of the station Mr. Fanelli, there is a lot of debris in the 79th street station that makes it unpleasant to wait in for more than a few minutes. The station could use a paint job and maybe new speakers so you could understand the delay announcements that are always being broadcast. Mr. Fanelli—there are a lot of people sleeping in the 79th street station & it makes me sad to think they have no home to go to. Mr. Fanelli, do you think you could find a more comfortable place for them to rest? It’s pretty noisy in the subway, especially all those express trains hurtling through every few minutes, anyway when the trains are in service. I have to admit, Mr. Fanelli, I think the 79th street station’s in pretty bad shape & sometimes at night as I toss in my bed I think the world’s not doing too good either, & I wonder what’s going to happen, where we’re headed, if we’re headed anywhere, if we even have heads. Mr. Fanelli, do you think if we could just start with the 79th street station & do what we could with that then maybe we could, you know, I guess, move on from there? Mr. Fanelli, when I saw your picture & the sign asking for suggestions I thought, if you really wanted to get to the bottom of what’s wrong then maybe it was my job to write to you: Maybe you’ve never been inside the 79th street station because you’re so busy managing the 72nd street & 66th street stations, maybe you don’t know the problems we have at 79th—I mean the dirt & frequent delays & the feeling of total misery that pervades the place. Mr. Fanelli, are you reading this far in the letter or do you get so many letters every day that you don’t have time to give each one the close attention it desires? Or am I the only person who’s taken up your invitation to get in touch & you just don’t have enough experience to know how to respond? I’m sorry I can’t get your attention Mr. Fanelli because I really believe if you ask for comments then you ought to be willing to act on them—even if ought is too big a word to throw around at this point. Mr. Fanelli I hope you won’t think I’m rude if I ask you a personal question. Do you get out of the office much? Do you go to the movies or do you prefer sports—or maybe quiet evenings at a local restaurant? Do you read much, Mr. Fanelli? I don’t mean just Gibbons and like that, but philosophy— have you read much Hanna Arendt or do you prefer a more ideological perspective? I think if I understood where you are coming from, Mr. Fanelli, I could write to you more cogently, more persuasively. Mr. Fanelli, do you get out of the city at all—I mean like up to Bear Mountain or out to Montauk? I mean do you notice how unpleasant the air is in the 79th street station—that we could use some cooling or air-filtering system down there? Mr. Fanelli, do you think it’s possible we could get together and talk about these things in person? There are a few other points I’d like to go over with you if I could get the chance. Things I’d like to talk to you about but that I’d be reluctant to put down on paper. Mr. Fanelli, I haven’t been feeling very good lately and I thought meeting with you face to face might change my mood, might put me into a new frame of mind. Maybe we could have lunch? Or maybe after work? Think about it, Mr. Fanelli.

I hope you'll pardon the informality of this letter, postmarked Olympia (Greece, not Washington), its task not simple: crossing lines you've crossed, time, mortality, to find you, who spent a lifetime crossing lines out, twisting, polishing them to shine cool and lustrous as the statue I fell in love with yesterday. I'm sure you saw him too, that perfect Hermes by Praxitelis, full lips, hips contrapposto. I wished to draw him down, latter-day Pygmalion, and embrace him. Or barring Eros (and the guards) I'd trace his face, the supple muscle of the marble. I had a student who resembled him— yes, Angelos—arrogant and beautiful. I never touched him though he touches me in dreams. Eros dangles his perfection in our faces like one-armed Hermes with his promise of the grapes. I was certain I'd dream of him last night. Instead I dreamed another in the growing chain of others with whom it ended not quite right. But the thirst was perfect, if its price pain and shattered crystal, spilling wine, all part and parcel of our imperfect lives. Then Art startles out of heartache, marble or page. You learned this long ago. Now I too see the wildest things require the strongest cages, the panther's double bars, or the seeds, bloodysweet and bitter, in the pomegranate's rind. Love held tight in a sonnet.

It has been so wet stones glaze in moss; everything blooms coldly. I expect you. I thought one night it was you at the base of the drive, you at the foot of the stairs, you in a shiver of light, but each time leaves in wind revealed themselves, the retreating shadow of a fox, daybreak. We expect you, cat and I, bluebirds and I, the stove. In May we dreamed of wreaths burning on bonfires over which young men and women leapt. June efforts quietly. I’ve planted vegetables along each garden wall so even if spring continues to disappoint we can say at least the lettuce loved the rain. I have new gloves and a new hoe. I practice eulogies. He was a hawk with white feathered legs. She had the quiet ribs of a salamander crossing the old pony post road. Yours is the name the leaves chatter at the edge of the unrabbited woods.

Dear one, the sea smells of nostalgia. We’re beached and bloated, lie on shell sand, oil rigs nowhere seen. It’s Long Island, and the weather is fine. What to disturb in the heart of a man? A boy is not a body. A boy is a walk. Shed the machine. Must be entirely flesh to fight. Must be strategy instead of filling. What to disrobe, there, centrifugal logic, as in here is a slice of my finger. Tell me the circumstance of your dick extension. When we slip into imprecision, we lose control, windowless walls close in. Awareness of being in a female body is a tinge of regret. “The human frame to adapt itself to convention though she herself was a woman.” To receive, to be entered, to fret around upon entry. It’s grand. I’m a system. Plants tall as wheat to hide in.

You’re right. I meant “midst,” not “mist.” I don’t know what I was stinking, I mean thinking, soap speaks intimately to my skin every day. Most days. Depending if darkness has risen to my skull like smoke up a chimney floe. Flue. Then no stepping nude into the shower, no mist turning the bathroom mirror into frosted glass where my face would float coldly in the oval. Picture a caveman encased in ice. Good. I like how your mind works, how your eyes inside your mind works, and your actual eyes reading this, their icy precision, nothing slips by them. Even now I can feel you hovering silently above these lines, hawkish, Godlike, each period a lone figure kneeling in the snow. That’s too solemn. I would like to send search parties and rescue choppers to every period ever printed. I would like to apologize to my wife for not showering on Monday and Tuesday. I was stinking. I was simultaneously numb and needled with anxiety, in the midst of a depressive episode. Although “mist” would work too, metaphorically speaking, in the mist of, in the fog of, this gray haze that followed me relentlessly from room to room until every red bell inside my head was wrong. Rung.

Dear Ra, There are no more cigarettes in this letter. It's all about spray-paint and traffic jams from here on out. Honk if you're epileptic, honk if it's 2:40 p.m., if you love shells. Honk in the name of freedom and fear of the human body. When I say "human body" I mean the kind that tears like lettuce. And when I say "fear" I mean the kind you feel seconds before crashing into a wall. That's the kind of poem this is. The kind raised on excess television violence. All that's left are ads for brotherhood and blowjobs. An ad for 2:42 p.m. A wad of hair. This isn't Marx. I'm not trying to bite the hand that feeds me sour candy. Run down the deer. Rain. Wear a red jacket and pumps. Pave the road back from my bed. I don't own a bed, it must've been the trap I've crept in and out of since I learned how to sleep alone. The Count of Monte Cristo's funeral. God's earlobe. An army of lamb can stop a film but not the violence of handbags. Not 2:43 p.m. Two forty-four pee em. Speak from a babble and a switch. Piss in a telephone booth. Grow a tree. Kidnap a car thief. Talk to him as though you want to be slammed in his trunk like a bag full of rocks. Talk to me in the woods. To my chest. With your fingers. Even if you kick in the gates, nyc is still nyc . My concussion is still a hotel. The guests are staying lukewarm and I'm picking up the tab. Ask me if I have ever wanted to tear out cables, burn up cradles. Interview my architects about hands. Ask an illegal immigrant how to escape from a political cliche. Does one use hammers? What about the moist area? The brutal caress? The spindle? Where does one learn to speak such a broken language? Are you jealous of films about Vietnam? This poem is dedicated to Jean-Luc Godard. This poem is dedicated to the man who put a gun in my gullet. This poem is a pay-phone. Someone has slashed its chords and ripped out its face. This drink is mixed with a plastic fork. This is an invitation to my Halloween party. Come as a key. Come as a metatextuai tear in the metatextual fabric. Listen to my concert through walls that were built to keep the vermin out of my armpits. Shovel. That's all I ask in return for my sonata on gravel. I mean gravel in a dialectic sense. As in, tomorrow dirt will be glamorous. Asphalt will be categorized as a sound. You will be categorized as an outdated method of psychotherapy. Like confession. Or the couch. Or the chair. I will be classified as a sore loser. Last year's winner must have thrown something hard at my head. Something that shattered like a waltz in a bomb raid. It's almost three o'clock. That makes it exactly several thousand miles since I left your town. I left your mice. I left a confusing note for the exterminators. I've been confused when I should have been reborn as a crusade or a hospital of innocents. I've been bored when I should've been screwed. I've been a hungry year.

You have forgotten it all. You have forgotten your name, where you lived, who you loved, why. I am simply your nurse, terse and unlovely I point to things and remind you what they are: chair, book, daughter, soup. And when we are alone I tell you what lies in each direction: This way is death, and this way, after a longer walk, is death, and that way is death but you won’t see it until it is right in front of you. Once after your niece had been to visit you and I said something about how you must love her or she must love you or something useless like that, you gripped my forearm in your terrible swift hand and said,she is everything— you gave me a shake—everything to me. And then you fell back into the well. Deep in the well of everything. And I stand at the edge and call: chair, book, daughter, soup.

I’m not interested in sadness, just a yard as elder earth, a library of sunflowers battered by the night’s rain. When sliced wide, halved at dawn, I can see how you exist, O satellite town, your bright possibility born again in drywall and the diary with the trick lock. Hardly held, for years I slept with my window wide open, wanting screen-cut threads of rain. Blind suburb, dear untruth, you who already know what I mean when I praise every spared copse, you were my battery, my sad clue, but after I mowed the lawn and watched robins chesting for seeds I couldn’t resist what hung in the toolshed, where, with a pair of garden shears I cut all the hair from my arms. That need, that scared need to whiten or clean a surface: plywood or lawn, and the spywall behind which I stood, stock-still, and sinned against the fly’s flyness. Though you live inside me, though you laid eggs in the moisture at the corners of my eyes, I still dream about your sinking empire twenty feet above sea level, and the many things you never see: beautiful bleached gas can, tomato posts bent into art,