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You are for me as you cannot be For yourself, chaos without demand To speak, the amethyst nothing Hidden inside the trinket shop’s stone, Dark eyes dark asterisks where light Footnotes a margin left blank. You Don’t look up to look up at the sky. Your ears parenthesize nothing That occurs, that I keep from occurring, In the poem, on the page, as you are For me, not a shadow, but a shade Whose darkness drops from no object But is itself yourself, a form of time Spanning nothing, never is your name.

I said you could snuggle. That doesn’t mean your cold feet all over my dick. Someone should teach you how to act in bed. What I think is you should keep your extremities to yourself. Look what you did— you made the cat move. But I didn’t want your hand there. I wanted your hand here. You should pay attention to my feet. You should picture them the next time you see a hot fifteen year old. Because there’s a lot more where those feet come from.

The big doll being broken and the sawdust fall all scattered by my shoes, not crying I sit in my dark to discover o failure annulled opens out in my hands a purse of golden salvaged sovereigns, from floors of seas culled. The dancing doll split in an anguish and all the cords of its elegant limbs unstrung; I stumble whistling; the bones of my skull marvelously start to sing, the whole shell of myself invents without peril and contains a court aubade. I hid the dovesmall doll but something found it. Frightened I gave the fire what was left. Surrounding, it mulled dulcet over the melting jeweled two blue eyes. That night our hearth was desolate, but then its stones sprung flowered and the soaring rafters arched. Now all the house laughs, the sun shouts out clearly: dawn! the sea owes us all its treasures; under the soft the riotous explosion of our waking kiss or gift, a stone plucked or shorn free of gravity falls upward for us, slow, and lies there, quietly.

Didn’t I stand there once, white-knuckled, gripping the just-lit taper, swearing I’d never go back? And hadn’t you kissed the rain from my mouth? And weren’t we gentle and awed and afraid, knowing we’d stepped from the room of desire into the further room of love? And wasn’t it sacred, the sweetness we licked from each other’s hands? And were we not lovely, then, were we not as lovely as thunder, and damp grass, and flame?

Of course we failed, by succeeding. The fiery cherub becomes his smothering. A greedy heart dives into a dream Of power or truth, and wakes up middle-aged In some committee room. It is eating paper instead of God. We two are one, my bird, this is a wedding. When love was war, you swore you’d burn Your life and die at thirty-five. I said good riddance, Bright hairy boy, I will beat you, down, Tear you to monkey shreds, survive like earth, Owl-eyed, because I wanted to see everything Black and permanent and kill you with your theories. We used to wake up sweaty and entangled. Thirty, home, and work. We cohabit in a functioning machine. There is violence, somewhere else. Do we wish this? It occurs, The flayed combatant, the dismembered child, The instruments in the basement. We must wish it. See, Between us is peace, our babies are plump, I know you, I caress you, I fail you. My faith adheres In nothing. Don’t leave me, don’t leave me.

All Kings, and all their favourites, All glory of honours, beauties, wits, The sun itself, which makes times, as they pass, Is elder by a year now than it was When thou and I first one another saw: All other things to their destruction draw, Only our love hath no decay; This no tomorrow hath, nor yesterday, Running it never runs from us away, But truly keeps his first, last, everlasting day. Two graves must hide thine and my corse; If one might, death were no divorce. Alas, as well as other Princes, we (Who Prince enough in one another be) Must leave at last in death these eyes and ears, Oft fed with true oaths, and with sweet salt tears; But souls where nothing dwells but love (All other thoughts being inmates) then shall prove This, or a love increasèd there above, When bodies to their graves, souls from their graves remove. And then we shall be throughly blessed; But we no more than all the rest. Here upon earth we’re Kings, and none but we Can be such Kings, nor of such subjects be; Who is so safe as we? where none can do Treason to us, except one of us two. True and false fears let us refrain, Let us love nobly, and live, and add again Years and years unto years, till we attain To write threescore: this is the second of our reign.

In the absence of anything as definitive as blood type or maths, I am delighted to declare I found the back to the earring, also the mildew is banished, albeit temporarily. I want to share this news with you, a check against the inventory of living. Personalized necklaces point to living. Customizable anything suggests it’s all worth it. Sometimes it’s “oh this iced finger bun” others it’s “put something in the diary to look forward to.” This is an elaborate mural in an ill-frequented part of the city. My diary is full and the bakery is out of buns. Indoors there needs to be a swap from idle teasels to cacti. (Some sort of permanence that works in the way I work — water, light, a finger touch confirming my edges.) I only have cats to verify I’m there. • I am building up evidence. Some bodily. Some constructed. On balance, perhaps I am more a person who racks up indicators of taste as proof of living. There are condiments, playlists, preferred linens. I first got drunk on Cinzano. There was no one taking notes. I used to dream of sex in a fully upholstered room with no windows or doors. This idea of rabbit fur rugs and buttoned velvet cushions, immaculately conceived. Always snagged on the detail of things — how even did I come to be inside, nevermind out. The sex wasn’t the point. What I seek is magic like an intact lipstick mirror in an antique handbag, my own nifty (crackerjack?) endurance. Or to discover a gulping heart within a privet hedge. Or the druzy quartz of someone’s eyes long gone and to say it! • I am dying to be written about in your diary and my self-involvement extends to endless photographs of my eye makeup, which might be described as “signature.” FYI I prefer a fine brush to a pen. What can be said about slush, about the corners cut when cleaning the fridge. What can be said about what is considered to be ordinary. Crucially, love is a desire to be a witness and be witnessed, how you might skate past the provisional.If the house were burning down I would rescue all the photographs

The Baltic Sea froze in 1307. Birds flew north From the Mediterranean in early January. There were meteor storms throughout Europe. On the first day of Lent Two children took their own lives: Their bodies Were sewn into goatskins And were dragged by the hangman’s horse The three miles down to the sea. They were given a simple grave in the sand. The following Sunday, Meister Eckhart Shouted that a secret word Had been spoken to him. He preached That Mary Magdalene Sought a dead man in the tomb But, in her confusion, found Only two angels laughing. . . This was a consequence of her purity And her all too human grief. The Baltic Sea Also froze in 1303— Nothing happened that was worthy of poetry.

I learned to hide my wings almost immediately, learned to tuck and bandage them down. Long before the accident, before the glass shattering and that scene going dim, dimmer, and then dark, before the three fractures at the axis, three cracks in the bone, it had already begun. My voice had begun to deepen, the sound of it suddenly more my father's than my own. My beard had started growing, my bones growing, my bones sore from the speed of their growth, and there, at fourteen years of age, the first tugging of the muscles between my shoulder blades. It began as a tiny ache. It was just a minor irritation. Day after day passed, and this ache grew, and then the tips of the cartilaginous wings began to tent my skin. Father Callahan had already warned that in each of us there was both potential for bad and good. When trying to shave for the first time, I nicked my cheek, the bleeding slow but continuous. Standing there, dabbing at this small cut with tissue paper, the first tear surprised me, the left wing heaving through that fleshy mound of muscle between my shoulder blades and then the skin. I buckled and, on my knees, the right wing presented itself more rapidly than the left. When I stood, there in the mirror, my wings outstretched with their tiny feathers wet, almost glutinous, a quick ribbon of blood snaking down my back. You wonder why I am such a master of avoidance, such a master of what is withheld. Is there any wonder, now? I had no idea then they would wither and fall off in a few weeks. When Father Callahan patted my head in the sacristy and told me I was a good boy, a really good boy, an extraordinary boy, I wanted to be anything but extraordinary.

From a newspaper photo and article about my godfather, James Moreno, East Los Angeles, 1950. (Three police officers took a brutal beating in a wild free-for-all with a family, including three young girls. From left, James, 19, and Alex, 22, in jail after the fracas on the porch of their home at 3307 Hunter.) Jimmy is staring off the page, hands in his pockets. A four-button dark shirt. No bruises, but he looks dazed. Alex wears a leather coat and a polka-dot shirt, which is in itself a crime. Nowhere is there a photo of a young girl with a face carved like a racetrack saint, eyes with all bets called off, grinning like a coyote. (Officer Parks had his glasses broken with his own sap and was thrown through a window.) Jimmy and Alex are my dad’s cousins, lived on Boyle Heights and tortillas. Mama says the cops always harassed them, those niños from East L.A., driving their low-riders, chrome shinier than a cop’s badge. And why wasn’t Coyote Girl mentioned, that round-armed girl with a punch like a bag of bees, a girl with old eyes, her lips cracking open as she saw the cop sailing through glass, boiling out of Boyle Heights, skidding on the sidewalk, flat as a tortilla? (The officers received severe cuts and bruises, were treated at a hospital and released in time to jail the youths, who were charged with assault with a deadly weapon.) Two years later, I was born and Jimmy entered the church, hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched, watching the christening. Four drops of water, like popped-off wafer-thin buttons, fell on my head. No. He never showed up that day or any other. My spiritual guardian must’ve been there in spirit only. He didn’t know nada about Got and no one knows where he is today, but I think you could find him at the end of a knife. Or in the slash of the z in ¡La Raza! the dark blood reds of graffiti. Or tomatoes grown in old coffee cans by a white-haired man sitting in the sun in a dark shirt, next to an old woman growing younger every day as I tell her story, my story, our story with all the grace and power of a deadly weapon.