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The shirt touches his neck and smooths over his back. It slides down his sides. It even goes down below his belt— down into his pants. Lucky shirt.

In the aftermath of calculus your toast fell butter-side down. Squirrels swarmed the lawns in flight patterns. The hovercraft helped the waves along. From every corner there was perspective. On the billboards the diamonds were real, in the stores, only zirconia. I cc’ed you. I let you know. Sat down to write the Black Ice Memo. Dinner would be meager & reminiscent of next week’s lunch. So what if I sat on the sectional? As always I was beside myself.

I sell one bristle brushes. People seeking two bristle brushes I send to the guy on Amsterdam, who’s in a rush. I may have one customer a year for my one bristle brushes, a one-eyed lover of tanagers, she may have one dollar to spend in the moment light’s neither day’s or night’s, but one’s where infinity begins. Whoever she is, she’s always painting barbules, I’m always thinking, no one will notice that they notice this, that her tanagers move, that everything’s alive. We talk care and feeding of the one bristle brush. Care exists. I thrive.

I am forced to sleepwalk much of the time. We hold on to these old ways, are troubled sometimes and then the geyser goes away, time gutted. In and of itself there is no great roar, force pitted against force that makes up in time what it loses in speed. The waterfalls, the canyon, a royal I-told-you-so comes back to greet us at the beginning. How was your trip? Oh I didn’t last you see, folded over like the margin of a dream of the thing-in-itself. Well, and what have we come to? A paper-thin past, just so, and ‘tis pity. We regurgitate old anthems and what has come to pass, and why dwell on these. Why make things more difficult than they already are? Because if it’s boring in a different way, that’ll be interesting too. That’s what I say. That rascal, he jumped over the fence. I’m wiping my pince-nez now. Did you ever hear from the one who said he’d be back once it was over, who eluded me even in my sleep? That was a particularly promising time, we thought. Now the sun’s out and it’s raining again. Just like a day from the compendium. I’ll vouch for you, and we can go on scrolling as though nothing had risen, the horizon forest looks back at us. The preacher shook his head, the evangelist balanced two spools at the end of his little makeshift rope. We’d gone too far. We’d have to come back in a day or so.

On sullen nights like these when my spirit counts its woes like pearls on a string, you bring me armfuls of spare pantsuits and clear-eyed hints about the woman who might kick up her heels in them, flooding rooms with cunning, air, an almost gaudy vitality. Gaudy but sober: when your wayward husband courted the heiress, you stormed her gates disguised as a floozy—and asked the butler to serve you gingerale. It was life you’d rather be drunk on, roaring life that told you there is no time for spirits of dark staircases, only lightning ruses that not only leave no bruises but give all parties their wish: rinsed vision and second chances. Losing a boot heel and giddily claiming I was born on the side of a hill is easy. For every such moment there are ten when my ideal snags midflight, a bag caught in branches. But a girl can dream, can realize, high on heroines, that she is mortal and therefore fearless; that sanity supplies the ground bass to the wildest singing; that breezes made visible make the finest winds.

Others, I am not the first, Have willed more mischief than they durst: If in the breathless night I too Shiver now, 'tis nothing new. More than I, if truth were told, Have stood and sweated hot and cold, And through their reins in ice and fire Fear contended with desire. Agued once like me were they, But I like them shall win my way Lastly to the bed of mould Where there's neither heat nor cold. But from my grave across my brow Plays no wind of healing now, And fire and ice within me fight Beneath the suffocating night.

In my car, driving through Black Mountain, North Carolina, I listen to what sounds like Doris Day shooting heroin inside Sly Stone’s throat. One would think that she fights to get out, but she wants to stay free in this skin.Fresh, The Family Stone’s album, came out in ’73, but I didn’t make sense of it till ’76, sixth grade for me, the Bicentennial, I got my first kiss that year, I beat up the class bully; I was the man. But for now, in my head, it’s only ’73 and I’m a little boy again, listening to Sly and his Family covering Doris’s hit, driving down I-40; a cop pulls me over to ask why I’m here, in his town, with my Yankee tags. I let him ask a series of questions about what kind of work I do, what brings me to town—you know the kind of questions that tell you this has nothing to do with driving a car. My hands want to ball into fists. But, instead, I tell myself to write a letter to the Chief of Police, to give him something to laugh at over his morning paper, as I try to recall the light in Doris Day’s version of “Que Sera Sera”—without the wail troubling the notes in the duet of Sly and Cynthia’s voices. Hemingway meant to define courage by the nonchalance you exude while taking cover within your flesh, even at the risk of losing what some would call a melody; I call it the sound of home. Like when a song gets so far out on a solo you almost don’t recognize it, but then you get back to the hook, you suddenly recognize the tune and before you know it, you’re putting your hands together; you’re on your feet— because you recognize a sound, like a light, leading you back home to a color: rust. You must remember rust—not too red, not too orange—not fire or overnight change, but a simmering-summer change in which children play till they tire and grown folks sit till they grow edgy or neighborhood dogs bite those not from your neigborhood and someone with some sense says Down, Boy, or you hope someone has some sense who’s outside or who owns the dog and then the sky turns rust and the streetlights buzz on and someone’s mother, must be yours, says You see those streetlights on don’t you, and then everybody else’s mother comes out and says the same thing and the sky is rust so you know you got about ten minutes before she comes back out and embarrasses you in front of your friends; ten minutes to get home before you eat and watch the Flip Wilson Show or Sanford and Son and it’s time for bed. And it’s rust you need to remember when the cop asks, What kind of work you do? It’s rust you need to remember: the smell of summer rain on the sidewalk and the patina on wrought-iron railings on your front porch with rust patches on them, and the smell of fresh mowed grass and gasoline and sweat of your childhood as he takes a step back when you tell him you’re a poet teaching English down the road at the college, when he takes a step back— to assure you, know, that this has nothing to do with race, but the rust of a community he believes he keeps safe, and he says Have a Good One, meaning day as he swaggers back to his car, and the color of the day and the face behind sunglasses and the hands on his hips you’ll always remember come back gunmetal gray for the rest of this rusty afternoon. So you roll up the window and turn the music back on, and try to remember the rust caught in Sly’s throat— when the song came out in ’73, although I didn’t get it till ’76, sixth grade for me, the Bicentennial; I got my first kiss that year. I beat up the class bully. I was the man.

Spandex leggings authenticating my anaerobic exit strategies. Crotch but a bumper sticker in a heretofore-fleeting waterloo. Crunk repentance. I span our doomed alphabet soup like Jane Fonda’s antiwar legs in calisthenic videos. My zenith of hair a brown, wannabe-Fawcett, mean-ole-toucan pupic papa — . He who so feeds on an entire corpus and still starves, helms the colloquium outside the bathroom of transubstantiation. Tonight — a vastly archived Nietzschean nighttime — I anal bleach my humpty- dumpty stigmatas. Boys conch with crimson Hollywood carpets that disentangle from their cavities, accustoming their catwalks upon the blood clots of their mamacitas. As twilight uncrowns the shade, I howl effluvium, switchblade hue to hue. I plié before the gas cloud lifting jumbo leaves. Like a mythic infantry, the thirsty roaches begin to leatherflock.

Jewelry boom box spittin’bidi bidi bom bom he verges his groove of slapstick smoke across our donated mosquito nets bidi bidi bom bom all night he fingertips our omnivorous junk in his cruel maw of tooth gaps magical realistic funky ass choral arrangements of servitude mighty dump truck hip-ee hip-ee dales my rotunda all over these unsullied shimmies bidi bidi bom bom orb-spider thighs cloaking his genocidal hunches Momma catapulting protection abracadabras over our twiggy panoplies we painstakingly bedecked how many times haven’t we fallen for mishandled precipices in the wrongheaded entirety of machomanic evacuation asteroid in mouth-crooked chaps guayabera deep pink guava pulp rum & coke in his fierce prayerful grip to bypass civility a Google-translated wink inumbrated eyebrows to cast embered mercies I pump bidi bidi bom bom hormonal harmonies for his jawlined mitzvahs bidi bidi bidi bidi bidi on wings only light will kerfuffle flight born at his bidding va-voomed for his favor we puff from the tail of his pickup truck we clothes- line an underwater continent marooned & whiplashed for genesis if carnage can charade competency we too can corrupt castanets timbre compulsory penances over his padded knees bidi bidi bom bom above his life insurance policy rates coma with anointed vanity with the right song a stone will pass for bread break for a fool’s sunrise achieve the love ritual cut scorn’s willy bob hither to this bomb

The phantom happiness I sought O’er every crag and moor; I paused at every postern gate, And knocked at every door; In vain I searched the land and sea, E’en to the inmost core, The curtains of eternal night Descend—my search is o’er.